


The Speciation

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [10]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 25,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3612447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something not right about Marco's friend Erek. He acts strange. He's in The Sharing. He has no smell, which should be impossible. And he's figured out who the Animorphs are.</p><p>But it's not as bad as it seems -- Erek's a chee, a type of alien android, and part of a secret group who oppose the yeerks, too. They want to help free the planet. There's just one problem; pacifism is hardwired into their programming, and they're incapable of committing violence. They can be reprogrammed with a particular artifact that needs to be taken from the yeerks, but the mission is difficult and dangerous. Furthermore, many of the chee don't want to be able to fight. They're worried that violence will change who they are and turn them into something they don't want to be. The Animorphs have a hard decision to make -- enable Erek's group to help them win the war by changing the nature of an entire species, or let the chee be and continue to fight alone. But if even the chee can't agree among themselves on what they want, who should the Animorphs listen to? And does the freedom of the chee, the last of their kind, outrank the danger to the freedom of humanity?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to JustAnotherGhostwriter, who has generously loaned her awesome betaing skills and general support to this project from start to finish and without whom this would almost certainly not exist (and would certainly be much worse), and Pawnofanellimist, as well as my innumerable temporary beta readers. Also thanks to Featherquillpen, who came up with the series title.

My name is Cassie.

And for the first time in a long time, I was in a pretty good mood.

After all, we'd won on the logging thing. We'd actually won. We'd stopped the yeerks from tearing up the National Forest, and we'd saved the Commissioner from life as a Controller doing it.

Of course, the reason the forest and the Commissioner had even been in danger was because the yeerks were looking for us. But still. A victory was a victory. It would've been nice to take a bit of a break and bask in it for a while, without anything new and strange cropping up to threaten our lives.

But that would never happen.

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting one hand up in a nonverbal request for Marco to slow down, and trying not to be distracted by what even I could recognise as his horrible new haircut. This gesture required some tricky rebalancing of the duck whose wing I was bandaging, but I managed it. “What happened? From the beginning.”

Marco absent-mindedly plucked a piece of twine out of Ax's hand before he tried to eat it, glanced up at Tobias for confirmation that the Animorphs were still alone in the barn, and started again. “Right, so we were on this mission...”

“Mission?” Rachel asked, raising an eyebrow.

“A private mission. Didn't want to disturb you guys with it.”

“We were at a concert,” Jake confessed. “As dogs.”

I raised an eyebrow at Jake. So turning into rats for a project was a problem, but sneaking into a concert as dogs was okay?

“I went and Jake had to be responsible and keep an eye on me,” Marco corrected, glancing at me. I wondered how long it had taken them to come up with that excuse. “Anyway, right in the middle of The Offspring set, and let me tell you, you have not heard The Offspring until you've heard them with dog ears, we run into Erek King, who's handing out flyers for The Sharing.”

“Who's Erek King?” Rachel asked with a frown, at the exact moment that I asked, “Wait, this was a Sharing concert?!”

“Erek's a kid who used to go to our school,” Marco continued patiently, “until he transferred to Truman about a year back. And it wasn't a Sharing concert, he was just advertising for them. So he goes up to pet us, and then we notice it.”

“Notice what?”

“He doesn't have a smell.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, he doesn't have a smell?”

"I mean that he didn't smell. He had picked up some odors off other people, off the ground, off dogs, whatever, but he had no smell himself. None. Like a black hole of smell. Like nothing there, nobody home."

"Maybe you just didn't notice it," Rachel suggested.

"Rachel, you've been in wolf morph," Jake said. "You know how good your sense of smell is? Well, the dog's sense of smell is almost that good."

"So, what does it mean if a kid doesn't smell like a human?"

"There are plenty of times when you don't smell human," Rachel said with a smirk. "But then, maybe that's because you have a small monkey living on top of your head."

I tried not to laugh. I really did.

"Next time you decide to get a haircut, talk to me first," Rachel said.

“Did you get the haircut before or after the dog thing?”

“Is that really what's important here?” Marco asked impatiently. “We find somebody who doesn't smell, and you want to hear about my hair?”

“Yes. Before or after?”

“Before.”

“So your human form 'remembers' your new haircut. But heals injuries.”

“Didn't we already go through this with my earrings?” Rachel asked.

“Your ears were pierced before we got this power,” I pointed out, “like all my scars. A 'scan' of a default natural form makes sense. But a haircut... it's fortunate, but confusing. I guess that means we age too.”

“Wait,” Marco said, “there was a chance we didn't age?”

“I considered it a possibility, if we reset to however we were when we acquired the power,” I shrugged, “but then andalites would be functionally ageless, so unless Elfangor and Alloran acquired the ability to morph at a much later age than Ax did...” I glanced at our resident andalite, who had somehow managed to tie the fingers on his left hand to a haybale by playing with twine. He didn't offer any new information. Not that I expected him to.

"He doesn't smell, and he's handing out flyers for The Sharing," Jake said, bringing us back on track.

"He must be connected to the yeerks," Rachel said with a shrug.

"But how?" I asked as I pushed the duck back into its cage. "I mean, yeerks infest various species – humans, hork-bajir, taxxons. But that doesn't change the fact that a human with a yeerk in his head should still smell like a human."

"Chapman is a Controller. He still smells human," Marco pointed out. "And by the way, I can't believe I'm even talking about how the vice principal smells."

Jake shrugged. "I guess we need to find out what's going on with Erek."

"But how do we find him?" Marco asked.

"Infiltrate a meeting of The Sharing?"

<I could do surveillance of his school.> Tobias said.

"Or maybe we could go back to where the concert was and look for clues," Rachel said. Then she winced. "Wow, that sounded so Nancy Drew."

"Maybe Ax can try and tap into the Internet and get past all the security buffers and locate him," Marco suggested.

I held up my hand like I was asking a question at school. "Those are all fine plans, but how about if we just look him up in the phone book?"

Everyone just stared at me for about five seconds.

"Or we could just look him up in the phone book," Jake said sheepishly.

I headed for the house to get a phone book.

“Hey, sweetie,” Dad said as I went through the kitchen. “Everything going well?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We just need to look someone up.” I found the phone book and headed back out. Dad didn't challenge me. Either he was still making an effort not to interfere on my life, or an environmental awareness group needing to look people up was totally normal and didn't require questioning. Maybe both.

I had the book open to the K's by the time I got back to the barn. "There are twenty-seven 'Kings’ listed. But you said he transferred to Truman, so there are maybe six 'Kings' that are in that part of town."

"We work our way down the list," Marco said. "Although he still could have an unlisted phone."

"I can't hang out tonight," Jake said. "I have got to write that English paper."

"Here's a clue on the English paper. Don't say 'I have got to,'" Marco teased.

"I could go tomorrow, maybe," Rachel said. "But not tonight. My dad is in town just for tonight. He's taking me and my sisters to Planet Hollywood."

I looked at Marco. "I'm free," I said.

<I'm good till it gets dark,> Tobias volunteered.

"Fine. Me and Cassie and Tobias till it gets dark," Marco said. "Shouldn't be too hard. Our mission: to find the boy who doesn't smell."

"Maybe he just showers a lot," Rachel said. "Did you think about that?"


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn't actually that hard to find Erek King. We just visited each King house in the area, one by one, until we saw him.

It was about 6pm when we did see him. I'd just started mentally planning excuses for why I wasn't home and Tobias had started complaining about the fading light when the front door of a King residence opened and a teen boy walked out. He had brown hair, just a little over his ears, and would've been about five feet tall. He was kind of cute, actually. Like a shorter version of Jake, strong and confident-looking.

<That's him!> Marco said excitedly. <That's Erek.>

We watched Erek walk to a nearby shop, where he bought some milk. Then he started walking back home. Unless the milk contained super-secret Empire messages, we weren't learning much. But we knew where he lived, and that had been the point.

I really wanted to go wolf and get down there and smell him myself, even though that would have been really stupid. No smell? How did somebody have no smell? He might be an alien, of course; but andalites had a smell, hork-bajir had a smell. And if dog smell really was nearly as good as wolf smell, they could smell pretty much everything.

Well. Pretty much everything on Earth.

Maybe Erek was some kind of life form that was just really different to anything on Earth. Maybe his sweat and breath and skin were made of things that nothing on Earth had evolved to be able to smell, because there was nothing similar there. Was that possible? I didn't know.

<Heads up,> Tobias warned. <We have something happening down there.>

Three guys had rounded the corner behind Erek. They looked a few years older, and I didn't like the way they moved. They seemed to be... closing in on him.

<This isn't good,> Tobias said.

The three of us spilled air from our wings and dived, wanting a closer look. I could see the face of one of the guys behind Erek. It was an expression I had seen before: the idiot, giggling sneer of a bully.

Suddenly, the guys raced forward. Erek spotted them and started to run.

It was a street on the edge of a development. There was a lot of traffic to Erek's left and a stone wall to his right. The stone wall ended about fifty yards away, where it opened for the entrance to the subdivision.

<If this guy is a Controller, these punks are making a serious mistake,> Marco said. <They may get him today, but they might regret it later.>

<Maybe I'll just give that one jerk a little talon haircut.> Tobias said.

<We shouldn't get involved,> I said. But I didn't try to hide the disgust in my tone. I never got bullied as much as Tobias used to, but bullies still made me sick. <If a Controller sees a red-tailed hawk diving on – >

<Yeah, yeah, I know.>

It all happened in a flash.

Erek ran. He tripped. He sprawled forward, out into the street. He slammed into the broad side of a passing bus.

WHAM! I could hear the impact from up in the air.

And then . . .

And then ... for just a second, Erek wasn't there anymore. Something else was where he had been.

Something that seemed to be made of patches of steel and milk-white plastic.

Then, in the next split second, Erek was back. A normal boy, lying winded on the sidewalk.

The bullies ran off. The bus driver never even noticed and drove on.

<Did you see it?> Tobias asked.

<Yeah. I sure did,> Marco replied.

<What was it?>

<I don't know,> Marco said. <But I know what it wasn't. It wasn't human.>

<We need to talk to Ax,> I said to Tobias.

<Definitely. That was not human. That was seriously not human.>

<So you did see it, right?> Marco said. <I'm not crazy?>

<Yes, you're crazy. But I did see it,> Tobias said. <Very weird.>

Below us, Erek climbed up off the sidewalk, dusted himself off like nothing had happened, and resumed walking toward home. He left a little trail of milk behind him as he walked.

<Hang a right.> Tobias said. <We'll get some good updrafts off the road. Whatever your friend Erek is, Marco, I don't think he's from around here.>

We flew hard and fast toward home. While Tobias split off to round up Ax, I stayed with Marco. We were probably going to meet in the forest anyway, so I might as well stick around while he called Jake. It would save a lot of message-carrying later. I tried not to look out-of-place on Marco’s window sill while he demorphed, checked in briefly with his dad, and made the call.

He got Tom.

"Hey, Tom. Is Jake around there?"

"I don't know.” Tom's voice was faint to me, but I could hear it. Birds of prey have excellent hearing. “JAKE!" he yelled. "He said he's coming."

"Cool."

"Haven't seen you around here much," Tom said. "Keeping busy?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Marco said, in the chatty tones of someone who wasn't talking to an alien invader.

"Uh-huh. We're going up to the lake, do some waterskiing."

"You and Jake?"

"Yeah, right. No, me and The Sharing. You know Jake's too much of a social misfit to join," Tom said with a totally human, big-brother laugh of derision. "It's just that we have too many girls going and not enough guys."

A lie, of course. A lie basically designed to entice a teenage boy. Why was Tom suddenly trying to get Marco interested in The Sharing again? Was he after Marco specifically, or just taking the opportunity since he had him on the phone?

"So. I heard your dad was back at work. That's cool."

"Yeah, I guess so," Marco said cautiously.

"You could bring your dad," Tom said as casually as he could. "I mean, not like anyone wants their fathers along, usually, right? But I mean, maybe he's ready to get back out there in the world and all. The Sharing is a good place to make business connections, you know?"

"Yeah, I'll ask him," Marco said.

"Do that, okay? Your dad could probably use some down time to relax, take it easy, meet some people."

I watched Marco carefully. He wasn't blinking, and didn't seem to breathe any more than he needed to in order to speak. His knuckles were white.

"Hey, Marco. What's up?"

"What's up?! What's up? Those scumbags are after my father, that's what's up! How do you live with that? How do you look at that piece of crap every day? He's all like, 'Bring your dad to The Sharing, do a father-son bonding thing, and oh, by the way, would you mind if we stuck a - ?'”

"Shut up," Jake hissed.

Marco shut up. Jake let him calm down for a minute. He made "uh-huh" noises in the phone, like he was listening to Marco talking. He made a couple of laughing sounds. I guess Tom wasn't far away from the phone.

"Okay, I'm cool," Marco lied.

"That sounds good to me," Jake said, still pretending to have a conversation.

"We have to get together," Marco said. "It's a nice day out."

That was code for 'Forest, we need to talk.' It seemed ludicrous to use the code after shouting about the Sharing, but Jake quickly agreed and said goodbye. I waited for Marco to call Rachel, and then we headed out. Marco was silent the whole trip. Thinking, probably. About the problem with Erek? Or about his dad? I didn’t ask. I just hoped he’d stay on-task when it counted. We needed Marco. We needed everyone.


	3. Chapter 3

We made a detour to my house to get a pen and paper, which Marco carried to the scoop in his osprey talons.

While we waited for Jake and Rachel, he started on his English paper.

“Is this the paper that Jake was writing while we were playing spy?” I asked him.

“Uh-huh.”

I wasn't really in a position to judge anyone else's homework habits, so I didn't bother him further. I just sat on the grass (or what was left of it; Ax's efficient grass-munching hooves had left their mark), and thought.

Whatever Erek King was, he was with the yeerks. And he wasn't human. But unless Earth was some kind of alien magnet... that meant... “Marco,” I said, “how long have you known Erek?”

“I don't really know him,” he said distractedly. “He's just some guy I'd say hi to in the hall.”

“Well, how long have you said hi to him in the halls?”

“I don't know. Three years? Four, maybe?”

Four years! The yeerks had been on Earth for four years?! They'd had this nonhuman plant in place for four years? That or Erek, a human Erek, had been... replaced. I bit my lip. I didn't want to think about it.

Fortunately, Jake and Rachel showed up right about then.

“Is that your English paper?” Jake asked Marco, glancing at the crumpled mass of paper splayed across his knee.

“Yes,” Marco said testily.

“You got a topic?”

Marco raised an eyebrow at him. "I've already written three pages. What do you mean, do I have a topic?"

Jake smiled. "So, do you have a topic?"

"A topic will… emerge. I'm going to just write until I discover a topic. The topic will rise from these pages. It will reveal itself to me. I just have to keep writing."

Jake nodded. “Here's a topic for you – the use of total bull in the writing of English papers."

<So, about the Sharing agent who doesn't have a smell,> Tobias said pointedly.

“Right,” Rachel said. “What did you guys find out?”

Marco told them, with Tobias and me adding occasional corrections.

“Well,” Jake said, “that certainly doesn't sound normal.” He glanced at Ax. "So, Ax, you're the official alien. What does this sound like to you?"

<I do not know. It ... it doesn't sound like any species I know of.>

"What? Dude, you're the expert on aliens," Marco pointed out.

<Marco, even we andalites don't know every species in the galaxy.> I swear he sounded embarrassed.

"You don't recognize the description?" Jake asked.

<No.>

"The way you guys describe it, it sounds more like a robot or something," Rachel ventured. "But how does it pass for human?"

<Oh, that is technologically possible,> Ax said, relieved to be able to add something to our speculation. <It's probably a holographic projection. Like your primitive TV, only three-dimensional.>

"Primitive TV? Hey, we have cable at my house," Marco said. I smiled in spite of myself.

<So when Erek gets hit by the bus, he drops the hologram for just a split second,> Tobias reasoned.

<The power supply may have been interrupted or overloaded.> Ax suggested. <But that's the interesting question: What power supply? It would take a great deal of power to maintain such a hologram, hour after hour, day after day.>

“Title for your English paper,” Jake said suddenly. “'The use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content.'”

Marco grinned and opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off. "Is there any way to see through this hologram?" I wondered.

"We could hit him with something as big as a bus," Rachel suggested.

"Now, there's a classic Rachel suggestion," Marco said with a laugh.

“You know,” Jake said slowly, “in some militaries, they try to put a colorblind guy in every infantry unit, because colorblind people are really good at seeing through certain types of camoflage that rely on color to trick us.”

“I think Erek's hologram would take colorblindness into account,” Marco said, “or he would've been busted a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” I said, catching on, “but colorblind or not, the hologram is presumably meant to trick human eyes, right?”

Ax nodded, a gesture he'd picked up off us that looked totally weird on an andalite. His stalk eyes stayed stationary as his head bobbed. <The hologram is meant to trick humans. It would be tuned for human sight. Hawk eyes are better than human, but still see similar wavelengths of light. Maybe a totally different sort of vision would be able to penetrate the hologram.>

"Marco found out The Sharing is having a little waterskiing thing up at the lake," Jake said. He bit his lip and added, "Tom told him. Erek is in The Sharing. He'll probably be there, too. Perfect chance for us to get a good look at him."

“Now we just need a 'totally different sort of vision',” Marco groaned. "But no insects, okay?" I said. "All I'm saying is, no more insect morphs. Is that too much to ask?"

Everyone glanced at me. Like they expected me to come up with the perfect animal.

Of course they expected me to come up with the perfect animal.


	4. Chapter 4

Sometimes, I don't think the other Animorphs appreciate how much work I put into researching animals.

I mean, if we have a wolf morph and want to learn more about wolves, that's simple enough. I go get a book about wolves. But 'find an animal that sees differently to a human' is an entirely different question. There's no book titled 'animals that see differently to humans'. It's not like I have some kind of magic library where I can say that phrase to the librarian and they'll bring me an itemised list.

The hologram had looked totally normal to my osprey morph, and ospreys see ultraviolet, so ultraviolet wouldn't be any help. They also have sight specialised to see through water distortion, which hadn't helped. Fine. There probably wasn't much we could use in the bird kingdom.

Most likely, no mammal would be any help either. Mammals all see pretty much the same way. In fact, for mammals, humans have exceptional colour vision. Most mammals don't have anything like our range.

What else was there? Most things on Earth saw in basically the same range of frequencies, because our sun put out more of those frequencies. So far as I could tell, andalite vision was similar – or at least, Ax had never commented on human vision being unusual to him, beyond the lack of range. And he considered bird eyes to be excellent.

But then, andalites had evolved in ways that really capitalised on their vision. They'd evolved in ways that, before meeting them, I would've claimed were impossible. They had their normal eyes plus stalk eyes. More importantly than that, they'd evolved a frankly ridiculous system to eat without having to lower their heads and decrease their own visual range. In fact, if somebody had given me a piece of paper and said, 'design an ungulate that has the best possible vision', I would've drawn something very much like an andalite. And then I would've thrown it out and started again, because those sorts of workarounds evolving for the sake of increasing vision simply weren't believable.

But visual range told us nothing about visual acuity, or whether Ax saw differently to humans. His eyes were much less acute than a bird's, and he would've mentioned if he saw on drastically different wavelengths to us.

So. Same basic frequency range. Some animals saw in infra-red. Maybe we could try that? Some could detect polarised light. Mostly sea creatures, to my knowledge, but also flies. We all had fly morphs.

A wide range of morphs would be good. Or some way to get different perspectives, look for anything that didn't match up. Of course, it would be better if there was one morph that could...

I felt the smile creeping over my face, as I planned a trip to the library. I had to read up, to make sure.

But I was pretty sure I'd found the perfect morph.


	5. Chapter 5

We met up in the forest the next day after school. Everyone had to check in with their parents first, so I had plenty of time to try out the new morph and verify its abilities. I would've liked a wider range of morphs. I would've liked more time. But we would work with what we had, I supposed.

We met near the edge of the forest, within walking distance of my house, which let me carry the new morph there in a jar. Everyone beat me there for once.

“Hey, Cassie,” Rachel called as I approached. She was fully clothed, I noticed, as were Jake and Marco. They weren't wearing the spare clothes they'd stashed in the barn, either. That meant they'd biked or bused over instead of morphing. Probably conserving their strength to practice a new morph.

“What have you got for us?” Jake asked.

I showed them. Ax seemed indifferent and Tobias' expression couldn't change, but the others all looked a little sick. Marco paled.

“Cassie,” he said weakly, “I asked for one thing – ”

“A wolf spider isn't an insect,” I said, “it's an arachnid. Insects have six legs and three body segments. Arachnids have eight legs and two body segments.” I opened the jar and gently coaxed the little critter onto my hand. I didn't need to touch it – I'd already acquired it – but I wanted to put the others at ease. “Wolf spiders have pretty good vision,” I pointed out. “In fact, they have eight eyes.”

“You say that like it's a good thing. Like eight eyes is something anyone would want.”

I rolled my two human eyes. “Wolf spiders have three different types of eyes, Marco. They perceive light slightly differently in each type. And each of their four main eyes has slightly different colour sensitivity. With these, we'll be able to tell quite easily if anything doesn't match up.”

“Okay,” Jake said, “we should probably send in a few people, since we have a lot of area to cover. Ax has to go in, because we need his expertise on aliens.”

“Ax, don't tell me you're okay with this morph,” Marco groaned. Weird. I never would've thought Marco would be the kind of person to be afraid of spiders.

Andalites apparently didn't have the same aversion to spiders as humans did, because Ax leaned in close to peer at the spider. <It has eight legs,> he said approvingly. <It should not fall over all the time like a human.>

“I'll go in,” I volunteered. “I already acquired the spider.”

Jake nodded. “Then we'll draw straws for spot number three.” He bent down to grab some tough shafts of grass, broke one very short, and tapped them even in his fist. “Who wants to go first?”

"Hah. I know how to beat this," Marco said. "It's mathematical. If I choose first, my odds are just one in five. The next person to choose has odds of one in four, then one in three, and so on. So the safest thing to do is choose first."

He took a deep breath, reached out, and yanked up a straw.

It was a very short straw. "Really, it made perfect sense mathematically."

“You forgot to factor in the chance of later people not having to draw,” I pointed out. “It comes out as even probability no matter the draw order unless you replace the short straw each time it's drawn.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. "You know, if you're going to be a big baby, I'll do it." She looked a little nervous about the offer. Like she didn't want to be a spider any more than Marco did. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. We were turning into eight-eyed, eight-legged, cable-making little hunter robots. I thought the boys would be into that sort of thing, and Rachel just liked predators. Wolf spiders were excellent predators.

Marco really, really wanted to say 'okay'. We could all see it. But what he said was, "Don't condescend to me, oh mighty Xena. Just because I'm not a reckless idiot doesn't mean I'm a wuss. I've never chickened out on a morph yet. And if Ax is in, so am I. You can hang around and be the backup, Rachel. I'm going where the action is."

To which Rachel replied with a very calm, "Okay."

I held out the spider. “It's not bad. I'd put it on maybe fly level of control.”

“Flies are gross, though,” Marco pointed out as he reached out and tentatively touched the spider with one fingertip. But he was just whining by that point. Marco had never had any trouble with fly morph.

Ax acquired the spider, and I let it go. It scurried off into the underbrush to wreak havoc on the insect population. “We should probably have some fly eyes, too,” I told Jake and Rachel. “They can detect light polarisation. I don't know if that's useful but we might as well try.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “Rachel and me as flies, you guys as spiders, Tobias coordinating from the air as always.” He rubbed his hands together. “Whatever this kid is hiding, we'll see it.”


	6. Chapter 6

The lake was up in the mountains. For most alien-fighting guerrilla defenders of Earth, this would be a logistical nightmare. We'd have to make excuses to be away for ages and hire a bus.

Of course, Animorphs didn't have that problem.

Controllers would be on the lookout for animals behaving oddly, so we didn't all morph birds of prey and head out in a group. Jake, Marco and Tobias flew as birds, keeping close enough to be in thoughtspeak range but far enough apart that they didn't appear to be flying together. The rest of us went as flies, each burrowed under the feathers of a bird to protect us from the wind. I concentrated on keeping my grip on Jake's neck-feathers and trying not to fall. A fly had no chance of keeping up with a falcon.

The boys, of course, were strategising. By which I mean they were having the normal stupid argument.

<In a one-on-one, fair fight, an osprey would kick a peregrine falcon's butt,> Marco insisted.

<That's crazy talk. No osprey can fly like a falcon,> Jake replied.

<Excuse me,> Ax interrupted. <ls there some special meaning to this conversation that I don't understand?>

<Yeah,> Marco said. <The meaning is that Jake and I are scared, so we're babbling in a desperate effort not to think about it.>

<Ah. I am frightened, too. I don't really like morphing tiny animals. I keep thinking about all the rest of my mass.>

<Your what?> Marco asked distractedly.

<My mass. When you morph something smaller than yourself, your body mass must go somewhere. So it goes into Zero-space. Zero-space is the space that ships travel through when they are going faster than light. It's not very likely to happen, but sometimes a ship traveling in Z-space will intersect with a temporarily parked mass.>

That got everyone's undivided attention.

<Wait a minute. Are you telling me that when we get small, all the leftover... stuff... all the extra flesh and guts and bones go bulging into Zero-space like some big balloon of human tissue?>

<Of course. Where did you think all the mass went?>

Nobody answered him. I hadn't really thought about it. It occurred to me that I should have. I'd wondered about brain structure and alien biology, but hadn't even considered conservation of mass? That was just stupid of me.

Jake was no more thrilled than I was. <So right now there's a big bag of Jake floating in Zero-space? And it's possible some spaceship will zoom along and hit it and splatter it all over?>

<No, no, of course not,> Ax said.

We all relaxed. Way too soon.

<Of course no ship would actually hit a floating mass.> Ax said, talking to us like we were about four years old. <The ship's shielding systems would disintegrate the mass. That's what troubles me about doing small morphs. It very seldom happens. The odds are millions to one. But it could happen.>

I thought about this for a while. About a spaceship "disintegrating" some big wad of our mass. It was not a pretty picture.

<Hey, Ax?> Jake said. <You know how we wanted you to be honest with us? To tell us everything you know?>

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

<Small change. In the future, don't tell us things that will scare us silly just as we're going into possible battle.>

<A big wad of Marco in Zero-space,> Marco muttered, completely failing to make anyone feel better. <Like hanging your butt out of a car window, waiting for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off.>

Just at that moment, Jake topped the crest of the ridge. I couldn't see very far with my insect eyes, but I saw the tall pines that nearly scraped his belly. Below us, I knew, would be the lake, shimmering in the morning sun.

<Okay, guys,> Jake said, <this is where we split up. Just one final word. I know spiders eat bugs, so do not, I repeat, do not, eat any flies. We'll have enough to worry about in fly morph.> He dropped low so that I could jump off before heading off again. Marco landed next to me, and Ax dropped out of his feathers. We found cover in the trees and waited for the all-clear to demorph.

<Okay, guys.> Tobias's thought-speak voice suddenly spoke in my head. <Looks clear to me. You've got a guy and a girl maybe a hundred yards off. But I think they're making out, so they should be busy for a while.>

That was good enough for us. A few minutes later, two human kids and an andalite stood nervously in the forest, relying on the trees to conceal them.

I could hear the people at the lake, crashing around. Boys, girls, older people. We needed to move quickly, before somebody stumbled on us.

<Are you ready to morph again?> Ax asked, once we were back in our normal bodies. <I can't stay here in andalite form.>

"Yeah, yeah, I know,” Marco muttered. “I know. Okay. Okay, I'm going to do this. But I'm going to keep my eyes closed."

“You have a lobster morph, right?” I asked Marco. “Think of a spider like a tiny land lobster.”

“Not helping, Cassie. I was almost boiled alive as a lobster.”

Oh. Right.

I closed my eyes and focused my mind on the spider. It was a simple enough morph. I felt myself starting to shrink. Shrinking is always a little weird, but now I was also thinking about some big, disgusting balloon of Cassie mass suddenly bulging out into Zero-space. Whatever Zero-space was.

I could feel myself getting smaller. I could feel very strange things happening inside me: sudden feelings of emptiness where organs were simply disappearing. And there was a distracting squishy sound that came up my spine and through my skull. The sound of bones turning to marrow, and of marrow sort of oozing away.

Spiders didn't have internal bones. But even knowing that, the sensation felt weird.

POP! POP! POP!

I could see! I tried to close my eyes, but no! I didn't have eyelids. It's very hard to close your eyes when you don't have eyelids. Eyes were popping open in my forehead. Eyes were erupting out of my head like zits.

I was staring at Ax as he underwent a change very similar to my own. It was weird to watch an andalite turn into anything, but he was too far gone to be recognisably andalite any more. I was watching him with vision that was half human and half the shattered, broken-mirror vision of the spider's compound eyes. I have the eyes, but the instincts that interpreted my spider vision hadn't arisen yet, meaning that everything was just a confusing mosaic of images.

Something huge and bulging was growing from the place on Ax's face where a mouth should have been. Two monstrous, swollen jaw-like things. From the end of each one, a wicked, curved fang grew. But I was distracted from Ax's changes when, suddenly, legs exploded from my chest.

SPROOOT!

Four new legs, two on each side, just shot out of me, like I was a tube of toothpaste someone had stomped. They sprouted all Gumby-unformed, then began to form joints. Many more joints than I was used to. My human legs and arms were changing to match these first spider legs. I fell forward, no longer able to stand erect.

It wasn't much of a fall. I was already pretty small. The pine needles beneath me already seemed to be as big around as a human finger. Not that I had any fingers left to compare with.

New eyes began to form, giving me a good range with my dominant compound eyes and my peripheral, non-compound eyes. Finally, some new leglike things came sprouting out of my... well, out of where my neck used to be. They were like extra legs, only they weren't. Pedipalps. They helped wolf spiders hold onto their prey, and their mates.

Finally, the wolf spider instincts settled in my mind.

The wolf spider was named such because it is a hunter, like a tiny arachnid wolf. They don't hunt in packs or anything, but the instincts of a strategic predator were familiar to me by now. The wolf spider wasn't a spot-and-swoop-down hunter like an osprey. It was a stalk-and-ambush hunter.

It was well named.

As for sight...

To call the information that the wolf spider's different eyes gave a single sense was like calling smell and taste the same sense. Technically, they sensed the same sort of thing. And they were intertwined, with each informing the other. But they weren't exactly the same. They were treated differently. Processed differently. The visual range was drastically different from ours; the spider saw ultra violet, but no red. I was used to ultra violet from spending so much time as a bird, and used to limited colour ranges from being a wolf, so that wasn't too hard to handle.

No, what had got me the first time I'd morphed the wolf spider, and what still hit me this time, wasn't the sense of sight. It was the sense of touch.

The wolf spider has good eyes for a spider. But it's all the thousands of tiny hairs that really get the spider brain's attention. They sense every subtle clue in the wind. Every minor movement in every direction.

And all of a sudden it felt like the whole world was moving: leaves, pine needles, the dirt beneath my claw-tipped eight legs, bugs in the dirt, moles under the ground. All of it seemed to be hardwired into the hairs that covered my spider body. And my spider brain knew exactly what to do with that information. I was suddenly very keenly aware of everything happening within about a foot of my tiny spider body.

<We all morphed?> I asked.

<I think the lake is this way,> Ax said, taking the lead. Having no better direction, we followed.

Suddenly, from the sky . . . something fell toward me!

It landed right between the three of us. A grasshopper, three, four times our size. It looked like an elephant.

Then . . . thwap! It fired its huge hind legs and shot into the air. It disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

We raced on through the forest, covering the two hundred feet between us and the edge of the party. I sensed the nearness of humans. I ‘heard’ vibrations that might have been speech, but the voices were too garbled to make any sense out of.

<Cassie, Marco, Ax, you guys around?> It was Jake's thought-speak voice.

<Yes, Prince Jake,> Ax answered. <We are here.>

<We're not pretty, but we're here,> Marco added.

<Cool. I'm not exactly handsome myself. I'm in fly morph. Haven't found our boy Erek yet, though.>

Something massive and slow appeared in the air above me. I scampered sideways. It landed slowly with a loud WHOOOMPHHH!

A human foot. A shoe. Nike.

<You know, I'd been worrying someone might step on me,> I said. <But humans are so slow.>

<Be careful anyway,> Jake said. <Let me know if you find Erek.>

<I don't know how I'm supposed to recognize him. These spider eyes aren't good at seeing distances. And human heads seem to be way up in the clouds, from where I'm crawling down here.> I suppose it didn't matter, though. Either we'd see through his hologram, or it didn’t matter whether we found him or not.

We moved on, skittering swiftly through a forest of huge, slow-moving legs and feet.

Then, right in front of me, I saw it.

It looked like a bare human foot. Except that I could see through the skin. Through the toenails. With my eight strange, distorted spider eyes I could see right through the electronic haze of the hologram. I could see what was beneath the hologram.

I saw what looked like interlocking plates of steel and ivory. The "foot" had no toes. In fact, it wasn't shaped like a human foot. More like a paw.

It was not human. And everything in my tingling, buzzing, hyper, spider's senses told me it was not alive.

<Ax? Marco?>

<Yes, I see it.>

<What is it?>

<I do not know.>

<It looks like a machine, almost,> Marco ventured. <Like it's made out of metal.>

<Yes,> Ax said. <I think your friend Erek may be an android.>

<Android?>

<Yes. A robot. A machine made to seem like a life-form,> Ax said, as though it was just the most common idea in the world.

<This is like something you know about, Ax?> I asked, looking up at the thing called Erek.

<This is not a type of android I know,> Ax said. <It is not andalite. I don't think it is yeerk. I don't know what it is.>

Not yeerk? Then what was Erek doing on Earth?

My spider eyes could see the foot and most of the way up the leg. It was like looking at a double-exposure photograph. There was the out ward appearance of a human leg and, way up high, shorts. But beneath all that there was this machine made of what seemed like steel and ivory.

It was thousands of interlocked plates, almost like the chain mail armor knights used to wear. Each of the individual links was roughly triangular in shape. The "ivory" segments were a little larger than the segments that looked like steel. The robot... android... whatever it was, was smaller than the human Erek. The leg I was looking at was oddly constructed. More like a stretched-out dog leg than a human leg. I had no idea how it balanced. Dog legs weren't really designed for bipedal movement.

<Guys?> I said. <Does anybody else feel something... staticky in the hologram?>

<Probably a force field,> Ax pointed out. <To create a physical barrier in the same place as the visual barrier. It would account for Erek's lack of smell, as the smell of the materials beneath would not penetrate it. The force field itself, of course, would not have a smell. Probably.>

The robot leg, along with its holographic projection of a human foot, lifted off, as Erek went on his way.

<Jake?> I called.

<Yeah? Hey, I think I see our guy. There's this person . . . it's hard with fly senses, but I see this person who is kind of shimmering all over, and it's like there's something hiding underneath all the shimmering light.>

<Yep. That's him,> I confirmed. Aha, polarised light! I knew that sense would come in handy.

<Wait a minute! There's another one!>

<What?>

<Another one of them,> Jake answered. <I just buzzed right past him. There are two of these things.>

Without bothering to talk to each other about it, Marco, Ax and I split up, searching the immediate area for more holograms.

<What do you see, Tobias?> I asked.

<The tops of people's heads,> he replied, sounding bored. <People water-skiing. People eating hamburgers. There’s a vole hiding under a bush.>

<We need to find out how many of these things are here,> Jake said.

Marco said, <Okay, now things have gotten com – AAAAAAARGH!>

<Marco, what – >

<AAAAAAAARGH!!>

I was getting the hang of telling private from public thoughtspeak. And Marco's screaming hadn't been private.

I immediately sprinted for the trees, for cover to demorph and help.

<Marco!> Jake yelled. <What's happening?>

<Marco! Everyone can hear you!> Ax warned.

<Something . . . something just grabbed me!> Marco said, speaking privately again.

<I think it was a bird,> Ax said. <I saw it. Very big and black. It flew off.>

<Demorphing now,> I said, and focused on Cassie the human. <What do you need me to be and where?>

<Tobias?> Marco cried desperately. <Can you hear me?>

<Marco? What's happening?> Tobias answered. His reply came from far off.

<A bird ate me. Black bird. We're flying. Can you see... Help!>

<Marco, there are a dozen big crows flying. I can't tell which one.>

I don't think I'd ever morphed so fast in my life. _Cassie, be Cassie!_ But I'd be too late. I knew I'd be too late.

My eyes sharpened into human eyes just in time to see a crow above the trees jerk oddly, then drop like a stone. Something inside it was growing. Weighing it down.

I clambered onto newly formed human legs and ran.

I was late to the scene. Marco was half-demorphed by the time I got there, bits of shredded crow stuck to his hair and shoulders. Tobias was in the tree above, trying to look invisible. I followed his lead, staying in the trees. We were trying to look invisible because of the teenager who was standing about ten feet away, squinting at Marco in faint bemusement.

“Marco?” Erek said with a frown as Marco finished demorphing. “Didn't you used to have longer hair?”


	7. Chapter 7

I could see the wheels ticking behind Marco's eyes. I knew what he was thinking. Erek had seen too much, and that was a problem. There were a couple of ways to make that problem go away. It was too late to lie, of course, but there was the... direct method. Or we could kidnap him for three days, but if Ax was right and he was an android instead of a Controller, that probably wouldn't do anything. Either of those plans would require a lot more strength than Marco had in his little human body. He had at least two morphs that could deal with it, but we were still pretty close to the lake. All Erek would have to do was yell for help the moment Marco started morphing.

I focused on the wolf inside me. I wasn't going to just murder someone for seeing too much if I had any choice in the matter, but I could try to get him out of the area. If he was a Controller, we'd have to hold him. If he was a robot meant to act like a life form, well, we'd have to find out whether he was just a machine or if he had free will, and convince him accordingly.

Just then, a girl came running up. She looked down at Marco, then at Erek.

"Who is this?" the girl asked.

"His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You know the 'andalite bandits' Chapman is always talking about? The ones who use andalite morphing technology to carry on a guerrilla war?"

"Of course," she said.

Erek nodded at Marco. "I think this human is one of them."

Two. I could handle one witness as a wolf, maybe, depending on how strong Erek was. But two? Surrounded by help that was a single shout away?

My ears sharpened as keen wolf hearing checked in. I heard the peregrine falcon land on the branch above me. <What do we do?> I asked him.

<I don't know,> he said.

Well, the secret couldn't have lasted forever. I was surprised we'd stayed secret as long as we had. But there was no way to keep the two quiet so close to so many Controllers. All they needed to do was shout. Besides, I could already hear people approaching through the trees.

Erek jerked his head towards the girl. “This is my friend Jenny.”

Marco did not look pleased to meet her. His head jerked, and he stared behind Erek and Jenny. He must've heard the people approaching.

"Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep searching. I think I heard something over there."

Erek grinned at Marco's shocked and confused expression. He crouched companionably beside him, looking neither scared nor particularly surprised. "’There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio’," he said.

"Shakespeare?" Marco asked dully.

"Yes. Hamlet. I saw the very first performance."

"But ... but that would have been like centuries ago."

Erek nodded. "Do you know where I live?"

Marco nodded.

"Morph into something small enough to escape from here," Erek suggested. "Come to see me at my house, you and your friends. We have a lot to talk about."

"You're not human,” Marco said accusingly. “We know you're an android."

<Maybe we shouldn't antagonise this guy right now,> Jake pointed out.

But Erek merely grinned again. "And you're not an andalite bandit."

"How do I know I can trust you?"

Erek shrugged. "I could turn you in, right now. I'd be Visser Three's new best friend. Even the Visser knows how to reward those who carry out his orders well."

"Maybe you want to catch all of us at once," Marco argued. Pointlessly.

Erek raised an eyebrow. "Marco, if I gave you to Visser Three, he would get the names of all your friends from you. I know you're a brave person. You'd have to be, to do all you and your friends have done. But that wouldn't matter. If the yeerks had you, they would get everything you knew." He pressed a finger to Marco's forehead to make his point, and then stood to leave.

"We'll be there," Marco said, defeated. "I guess we don't have a choice."

Erek shook his head. "You misunderstand. We won't turn you in, whether you come or not. But this will be a meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too, fight the yeerks.”


	8. Chapter 8

“It's a trap,” Rachel said. “It has to be. He's with the Sharing, so he's helping the yeerks.”

<He could've turned Marco in, and didn't,> Tobias pointed out.

“He probably wants to blackmail us,” Rachel said. “Some kind of yeerk infighting.”

“Maybe,” Jake said, “maybe not. We should see what he has to say.”

“And give him the chance to blackmail us?”

“He knows what he knows,” I pointed out, “and so does Jenny. We don't increase the danger by talking to them. We just gain information. We should go.” I glanced at Marco. “If he's Marco's friend, he might be sincerely trying to help – ”

“He's not my friend!” Marco snapped. “He's just a guy! We went to school together. I probably wouldn't even remember who he was if he hadn't gone to my Mom's funeral. I barely know the guy.”

“Okay, okay,” Jake said. “Well, we should probably see what the guy has to say.”

“I still think it's a trap,” Rachel growled.

“Good,” Jake said grimly. “Somebody should think that. It's the only way to stay safe.”

Erek hadn't given us a deadline, so we decided to head over Monday, after school. Jake, Marco, Ax and I would go to meet him. Rachel and Tobias would remain outside as backup. Tobias could keep watch from the air to see if anybody entered or left the building by any means, and if things got dangerous, Rachel could go grizzly.

Ax was in his human morph, of course. An andalite rushing about town would cause unwanted attention. We filed down the ordinary-looking garden path in the ordinary neighbourhood, the grass on both sides perfectly cut and flowers in the flowerbeds well cared for. Jake's hand was trembling as he pushed the doorbell.

The man who opened the door wasn't Erek. It was presumably his father. He looked similar. Same eyes. Same hair color, in the bit of hair that hadn't greyed or fallen out. Did he know what his son was? Was he an android, too?

Mr King nodded. “Come in.” He led the way into his house.

The house was perfectly normal-looking. We walked through a lounge room with a TV displaying the news on mute. The door to the normal-looking kitchen was open. The most unusual thing you could say about it was that it was immaculately clean, with no coffee cups sitting around or whatever.

Two dogs rushed up, a Labrador mix and a fat little terrier. I immediately knelt to welcome them. The terrier started sniffing our shoes. The Lab just lolled over onto his back. I gave him a scratch. We could've been walking into some kind of trap, but I would've expected anybody setting such a trap to get the family pets out of the way first.

“Is Erek here?” Marco asked nervously. Apparently, he wasn't as reassured as I was.

Mr. King nodded. "Yes. Would you like a soda or anything?"

"No thanks, Mr. King," I said. The terrier was clamouring for my attention; I scratched his ears.

"You like dogs?" Mr. King asked.

"She likes any animal," Marco answered. "She even likes skunks."

"But dogs, do you like dogs?"

I smiled. I'd never been a dog, but I'd been a wolf. And dogs were... "If reincarnation were real, I'd want to come back as a dog."

Mr. King smiled, nodding as if I'd just said something profound. "Would you all come with me?" He turned and led the way toward the kitchen.

Mr. King opened a door. It led down to the basement. We followed him down the narrow wooden steps.

Okay. This part could conceivably be a trap. I noticed that Ax was morphing slowly out of his human shape, returning to andalite form a little at a time. He sensed danger and he wanted his tail available.

I wanted his tail available, too.

Mr. King paused when we all got down to the basement. He watched with absolutely no surprise as Ax finished transforming. He waited politely for Ax to be done.

Then, to my utter amazement, I felt a slight dropping sensation. It took a few seconds to realize what was happening. The basement was dropping like an elevator. When I looked up I couldn't see a roof overhead, just darkness.

"Whoa," I commented.

"Don't be afraid," Mr. King said, in the exact tone that I used when introducing humans to the wonderful new world of alien invasion. It was about as effective when he used it as it was when I did.

We dropped for a long time. If we were walking into a trap, it was going to be really hard to climb out of. Then, with a slight lurch, the basement elevator stopped.

"Is this the floor for men's clothing?" Marco asked.

I was almost not surprised when one entire wall of the basement, hung with tools and garden hose and a rake and hoe, simply disappeared. Where the wall had been was now a hallway lit with a golden light.

"My basement won't do this," Marco muttered to Jake.

"Have you ever tried?" he asked.

"This way," Mr. King said.

We followed him. It was way too late to start worrying now.

The hallway wasn't long, just fifty feet or so. It reached a dead end, a blank wall. But then that wall, too, disappeared.

"Yah!"

"No way!"

<Strange.>

"This is just a hologram, right?" I said. But somehow, I knew it wasn't. It was real. Unbelievable, yet real.

What was beyond the hallway was a vast, vast chamber, lit in glowing gold light, soft and buttery warm. I stepped out of the hallway onto springy grass. And over my head, maybe two hundred feet up, there was a glowing orb, like a sun. That's where the yellow light came from.

Stretched out before us, for more than the length of a football field, was a sort of park. Trees, grass, streams, flowers, butterflies flying around jerkily, bees buzzing from flower to flower, squirrels racing up and down the trees.

Walking here and there were androids. Androids in their natural form, machines made of steel and something white. The androids had mouths that were almost like muzzles, clumsy-looking legs, and stubby fingers.

But it wasn't the presence of half-dozen or so androids that was really shocking. What was really shocking was that there were hundreds, maybe even a thousand dogs.

Normal, everyday Earth dogs, every breed and half-breed you could imagine, running in packs, yipping, yapping, bowwowing, howling, growling, ruff-ruffing dogs. They were chasing squirrels, smelling each other, and generally having a great ole dog time.

Jake, Marco, and I stood there with our jaws hanging open like complete idiots. If Ax had possessed a mouth, his would have been hanging open, too.

It was doggie heaven. Dogs and robots in a huge, underground park.

One of the robots came trotting toward us. As it got near, a hologram shimmered around it. A second later, it was Erek.

"Welcome," he said. "I guess you're probably a little surprised."


	9. Chapter 9

“We are the chee," Erek said.

Mr. King had left, and Erek had brought us to a place beneath a large tree. A little stream trickled by, just a few feet away. A wall of silence had come down, as if someone had turned down the sound of all the barking dogs. I could still hear them, but it was as if the sound were far away now.

<You are androids.> Ax commented.

"Yes."

<You show a very high level of technological sophistication.> Ax said.

Erek smiled with what looked exactly like human lips. "We are just the creation. It is our creators who were the great builders."

"Why did you bring us down here?" Jake asked. "Why show us all this?"

"We want you to trust us," Erek said. "We know that you're suspicious. You have to be. I'm sure you've left some of your people outside, just in case we betray you. I wanted us to be equal. I wanted you to know our secrets, since we know yours."

"We saw you at the concert," Marco started to say.

He looked surprised, then nodded. "Ah, yes. You were the two dogs, weren't you? I sensed something odd about you. Tell me: What's it like to actually be a dog?"

"It's truly cool," Jake said. "You knew we were the two dogs?"

Erek shook his head. "We didn't know, but I felt something strange. We've known there were morph-capable forces on Earth. There is very little that the yeerks know that we don't also know."

"You were handing out flyers for The Sharing. You were at a meeting of The Sharing," Marco accused.

"True. But maybe I should tell you our story. Then you'll understand who we are. And why we are your allies. And also why we... or at least some of us... would like your help."

"That would be nice," I said weakly. I was still having a little trouble taking in the huge underground dog park and the amazing holograms and, oh yeah, the intelligent dog-robots who wanted our help.

Suddenly, everything around us dissolved. In its place there grew a vast, three-dimensional picture. It looked as real as Erek.

We were no longer on Earth. There were two suns in the sky, one small and almost red, the other four times as big as Earth's sun and a deeper gold. The trees and flowers and grasses around us were definitely not anything that had ever grown on Earth. The trunks of the trees were green and smooth. But instead of leaves, the branches just kept splitting into ever smaller branches and twigs that grew gradually from green to silver to a brilliant shade of pink. These pink twigs were all intertwined, so that from a distance the trees looked like huge balls of pink steel wool. I immediately tried to inspect them more closely, but moving too far away from our tree just made me walk through the hologram into the dog park again.

The trees were no larger than Earth trees, it seemed to me, but what were huge were the mushrooms. At least, they looked kind of like mushrooms. They were half as large as the trees themselves. Messy nests of some leathery, leaping, three-legged animal seemed to be perched on each of the mushrooms. There were other animals around, each stranger than the last. But the main animal we saw was a two-legged creature that stood may be four feet tall. It had long, floppy ears and a muzzle.

It looked weirdly like a dog that could walk on its hind legs. It looked, in fact, a little like Erek when he dropped the hologram and showed his true self.

"Our creators," Erek said. "They were known as pemalites. A hundred thousand years before the andalites learned to make fire, the pemalites were capable of faster-than-light travel."

I noticed Ax's tail twitch a little at that.

"And of course, humans were just hairy apes when the pemalites first visited Earth. The pemalites were not interested in conquest, or in interfering in the lives of other planets. They enjoyed life." Erek smiled. "They loved to play. They loved games and jokes and laughter. And they had been a fully evolved race for so long that all the harsher instincts were gone from them. They had no evil in their hearts. They had no evil in their souls."

I couldn't help but frown at that. I couldn't help but think that Erek didn't know how evolution worked, to say such a thing. 'Fully evolved' was a nonsense phrase. Evolution wasn't some progress towards an overarching goal that was reached and then nature said 'whelp, I guess we're done with evolving, then'. Nor did 'evil' make any sense when discussing biology.

But then, I was just a primitive human, and whatever the pemalites were, they and the chee were a lot more advanced. Erek was probably speaking poetically so that we could understand him. If I tried to explain germ theory to a hunter-gatherer tribe, I'd probably explain things in terms of souls and poetry too.

Besides, as I watched the hologram around me, it was possible to believe that on this weird Dr Seuss-like planet the pemalites had found some deep inner peace. There was just a sense of deep calm about the place. Like one of those Zen gardens or something. It just felt peaceful. Peaceful, but not dead or tired or boring. In fact, everywhere I looked, I saw pemalites jumping around, chasing, playing, and making an odd CHUK CHUK CHUK that must have been laughter.

The scene around us changed, like a movie doing a flash-forward. Now, mingled in with the pemalites, were androids like Erek. The androids looked vaguely like their canine creators.

"We were toys, originally," Erek said. "The pemalites made us to play with. They called us the chee. It's a word that means 'friend'. They also had work for us to do, but they created us mostly to be their companions. An artificial race, yes, but not a race of mechanical slaves." Erek looked at us and I swear there were tears in his holographic eyes. "We were their friends and equals and companions. They taught us to laugh and play. They loved it when they were able to create androids who could tell a joke. There was a celebration that lasted a year."

Then... ZZZZZZZAAAAAAAARRRRPPPP!

I jerked back. A monstrous beam of light sliced the ground open right in front of us, like some insane plow tearing up the earth. It incinerated the pink Brillo pad trees and the huge mushrooms.

"Then the howlers came," Erek explained. "They suddenly popped out of Zero-space, thousands of powerful ships. They had come from clear outside this galaxy. The pemalites had no idea who they were. And they never found out what the howlers wanted. The howlers made no demands. They just attacked. Maybe that's all they wanted: to destroy."

What Erek showed us next was like one of those horrifying films from World War II.

Pemalites hunted from the air. Pemalite space stations blown apart. Pemalite ships sliced open, and helpless pemalites left to drift through cold, dead space. The scenes of massacre just went on and on.

I noticed I was crying. I didn't look at the others. I couldn't look away from the horrible scene of chaos.

"Almost the entire race of pemalites was wiped out," Erek said. "A few hundred chee and a few hundred pemalites left the planet, escaping in a single ship just seconds ahead of a new wave of howler attacks. We escaped into Zero-space. We had no plan, no idea what to do."

"Why didn't you fight back?" Marco demanded. "I mean, you talk about how advanced the pemalites were. If they could create androids, they could create weapons."

Erek looked at him and nodded, like he agreed.

"The pemalites had forgotten the ways of conflict and war. They were creatures of peace. They'd forgotten that there could be such a thing as pure evil."

That answer made no sense. But none of us interrupted as Erek continued his grim story.

"As we ran for our lives through Zero-space, we discovered that the howlers had achieved a special revenge. The pemalites began to become sick. They began to die. The howlers had unleashed germ weapons. The pemalites were doomed. But we chee, we androids, were unaffected."

The scene around us became the inside of a space ship. A scene of chee, looking on helplessly while one of their creators writhed in pain.

"Then we remembered a planet. A planet similar to our own, but very far from our home and the howlers. It had only one sun and the light was pale, but there were trees and grass and wonderful oceans."

"Earth," I said.

"Earth," Erek agreed. "The pemalites had not visited Earth in fifty thousand years, and in that time, everything had changed. The wandering tribes of primates had created cities. They had domesticated animals. They were planting crops.

"We landed on Earth with just six pemalites still clinging to life."

The hologram disappeared, and the underground cavern was back to its normal self -- a wide park of Earth trees and Earth plants, with dogs everywhere.

"We could not save the pemalites. They would die. But we could try and rescue some part of them. We hoped we could keep their hearts, their souls alive somehow. We looked for an Earth species we could use to harbor the essence of the pemalites. Their decency. Their kindness. Their playfulness and love."

"Wolves," I said, my voice sounding distant even to me.

Erek looked surprised, but he nodded his holographically projected human head. "Yes. They looked most like the pemalites themselves, and humans were already domesticating them. We grafted the essence of the pemalites into the wolf species. And from that union, dogs were created. To this day, most dogs carry within them the essence of the pemalites. Not all, but most. Wherever you see a dog playing, chasing a stick, running around barking for the sheer joy of life, you see the remnants of the race of pemalites."

"That's why all these dogs are here," Jake said. "They're your… what, friends? Creators?"

"They are our joy," Erek said, "because they remind us of a world without evil. The world we lost. We chee are all that is left of pemalite technological genius. The dogs of Earth are all that is left of pemalite souls."

We all exchanged looks. On the one hand, several parts of Erek's story made no sense whatsoever. On the other, we were standing in a giant underground dog park talking to an obviously alien doglike android with extremely sophisticated holographic technology.

Several questions fought for supremacy in my mind. Eventually, one won.

“So,” I said, “when you say you grafted the pemalite 'essence' into dogs...”

“We grafted a reproductive pattern into a mental Zero-space anchor and bonded it to a wolf instead of a sentient mind,” Erek replied, as if he expected that sentence to make any sense to me whatsoever. I glanced at Ax, who ignored me.

<How did you manage to maintain integrity of such a complex graft over so many iterations?> he asked.

“We didn't. That's why you don't see any superintelligent dogs running around.”

"So you all pass as humans?" Marco asked Erek before the aliens could get into a complicated physics discussion. Or biology discussion. Or whatever they were talking about.

He nodded. "Yes. We live as humans. We play the role of children and then grow older, and eventually our hologram is allowed to 'die' and we start again as children."

"How long has this been going on?" I asked.

Erek smiled warmly. "I helped to build the great pyramid."

"You designed the pyramids?"

"No, no, of course not. We have never interfered in human affairs. I was a slave. I helped to quarry the stone. It was a challenge, because I was new at pretending to be human. I had to hide my real strength, of course. The pemalite home world had gravity four times stronger than Earth's. Naturally, we were designed for that gravity, which means we are quite powerful by human standards."

It was probably a good thing I hadn't tried to threaten him with my puny wolf teeth, then.

"And you stayed as a slave?" Jake asked. "You could have taken over Egypt. You could have taken over the world."

"No. We are not the yeerks," he said coldly. "You see, when our creators made us, they hardwired us for nonviolence. We are not capable of hurting another living being. No chee has ever taken a life."

Just then, I noticed a group of four chee walking quickly toward us. Erek saw them, too. Even though I know his 'face' was just a hologram, it seemed to me he was annoyed.

"What have you done?" one of the chee demanded. "What have you done, you fool?"

The four chee came up and glared at us with robot eyes. "Humans? An andalite? Here? What have you told them?"

"Everything," Erek said defiantly. "These are the ones, these humans and this andalite, who have been resisting the yeerks. They're the ones who can morph." His voice rose. "They are the ones who are fighting the battle we should fight."

"We are chee. We do not fight," one of the androids said. It turned on its holographic projector. A human body appeared. The body of an old woman, maybe eighty years old.

"I am Chee-lonos. My human name for now is Maria," she said. "I did not mean to seem angry toward you humans, or you, my andalite friend. My dispute is with this chee called Erek and some of his friends."

"We stood by helplessly as the howlers annihilated our creators," Erek said to Maria. "We can't stand by helplessly and watch this world be destroyed, too. Dogs and humans are intertwined. They have evolved a dependency. Dogs cannot survive without humans. If the humans fall to the yeerks, we, the last great masterpieces of the pemalites, and the dogs, their spirit-homes, will all die, too."

"We do not fight," Maria said heatedly. "We do not kill. You know that, Erek. Yet you bring these outsiders here. You blurt the secrets we have kept for thousands of years. Why? What good can come from it? We cannot fight to save the humans."

"That's where you're wrong," Erek said softly. "We can fight. While you and the others merely hope everything will work out, my friends and I have been infiltrating the yeerk organizations here on Earth. The yeerks even think that I am one of them."

Maria and the three unhologrammed chee just stared.

"The yeerks have been busy. They control a computer company called Matcom. They are working on a master computer to infiltrate and rewrite all the software in all the computers on Earth. When they have achieved sufficient force among humans, they will launch this computer bomb, and in a flash, control all computers."

"What does this have to do with us?" Maria asked.

"The heart of this system is a crystal the yeerks obtained from a dayang trader. The dayang didn't know what he had. But the yeerks did. The crystal is a processor more sophisticated than anything any human, yeerk, or andalite could create. And it is more than fifty-thousand Earth years old."

"A pemalite crystal!" Maria gasped.

"Yes. A pemalite crystal. If we had it, we could rewrite our own internal systems. Do you understand now? We could erase the prohibition against violence. We could be free! Free to fight!"

"A Pemalite crystal," Maria whispered. "You can't do this, Erek. You can't!"

But Erek just turned away. "If we can get the crystal, there is very little we can't do. Our strength, joined with these Animorphs? The yeerks would have to double their forces just to contain us."

<How did you convince the yeerks that you are one of them?> Ax asked him.

Erek turned off his hologram and became a machine once again. And then the front of his head split open. Inside his steel and ivory head was a chamber, just a few inches in diameter. And inside that chamber was a gray slug, helpless, unable to escape. Tiny wires, no thicker than hairs, wrapped around it.

<Yeerk!> Ax hissed.

"Yes," Erek said. "The yeerks believe I am human. I accepted infestation. But of course the yeerk cannot make a Controller of me. I made a place for him instead. He sees nothing. Knows nothing. I tapped his memory, not the other way around. And now I can pass among the yeerks like one of them."

“Is it in pain?” I asked. The little cage of wires didn't look comfortable. It looked downright cruel.

“No,” Erek replied indifferently. “My programming forbids that.”

"How do you keep it alive without Kandrona rays?" I asked.

"I am able to use my own internal power to generate Kandrona rays to keep this yeerk alive," Erek explained. "When I go to the yeerk pool I am able to trick the yeerks into believing that my yeerk is swimming in the pool. I generate a hologram of a yeerk leaving my ear and dropping into the pool. Later, I create a hologram of it returning. The yeerks never notice that they don't encounter this yeerk actually in the pool."

Well, that seemed simple enough.

"How do we fit into all this?" Jake asked. "I mean, what do you want with us, Erek?"

Erek resumed his human appearance. He stepped toward us, eager, excited. "We could fight together against the yeerks. We could be allies. If only... we need that pemalite crystal. But the yeerks have created a maze of defences like nothing you can imagine. That crystal is in a room at the heart of the Matcom building. There are hork-bajir everywhere. Elite hork-bajir warriors, the best.

"And the crystal itself is guarded by an ingenious system. It is concealed in a room of absolute darkness. Absolute darkness. The slightest, faintest light, ultraviolet, infrared, any light, will set off alarms. Within the darkness are wires that are set off by the slightest touch."

"So to get to the crystal you'd have to be able to find it without seeing it, and avoid the wires that are also invisible in the darkness," Marco said.

"It's like finding a needle in a haystack when you're blindfolded and can't touch a single piece of hay. The walls, ceiling, and floor are all pressure-sensitive, so you can't touch them. It may be impossible," Erek said.

"How are we supposed to do that?" Marco demanded. "How can you find something you can't see see? It's not like it'll smell or call out to us."

The wires weren't the main problem that I could foresee. “Would the sensors by set off by the infra-red produced by a warm living being?” I asked.

Erek frowned. “Probably not at a distance. But if you went around shining an infra-red torch in there, or actually touched the sensors, you might have a problem.”

“And the touch-sensitive wires. How sensitive?”

“The slightest brush – ”

“What about sound waves?”

“Unless you hit the resonant frequency, sound... should be safe.”

“And how big is this crystal?”

“About the size of a marble. Maybe a little bigger.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

"Excuse me?" Jake asked in surprise.

"It can be done," I said. "Probably. I mean... if we want to."

"Of course we want to," Marco said. "With these guys on our side, we actually have a chance of winning. Of course we want to. Animorphs and chee together? Our morphing ability, their strength and holographic tricks? We'd kick yeerk butt."

"No," Maria cried. "You don't understand. Chee do not hurt. Chee do not kill. No chee has ever taken a life." She grabbed Marco's arm and looked right in his eyes. "While humans and yeerks and andalites and hork-bajir and a million other species on a million worlds warred and slaughtered and conquered, we remained at peace. Would you end all that? Would you make us killers, too?"

"Yes, ma'am, I guess I would," Marco said, a little coldly. "We're in a fight for our lives here. Our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends – they are all going to be slaves of the yeerks, if we don't win. So I'll do whatever it takes. If you'd fought all those thousands of years ago, the pemalites would still be alive. And you wouldn't be living with dogs in a big underground kennel."

Maria let him go, and Erek nodded.

"A big underground kennel," Erek said bitterly. "Exactly."

But I met Maria's eyes. Jake and Marco seemed to have made up their minds, but I wanted to hear what she had to say.

"We'll get your crystal for you," Jake said. "Tell us all you know about this Matcom, and we'll get your crystal." He looked at the Maria. "Sorry, but Marco is right. The yeerks have my brother. There's nothing I won't do to get him back."

Maria glanced between Jake and me. I looked away.

We rode the fake basement back up, leaving the eerie golden world of dogs behind.

"So. Do we have a deal?" Erek asked. "You'll help us get the pemalite crystal? And then we'll fight alongside you to defeat the yeerks."

"Sounds good to me," Marco said quickly.

"Unless anyone has any objection –" Jake started to say.

"Erek, let us talk it over,” I interrupted. “It's a big decision."

“What decision?!” Marco asked, sounding surprised at my objection. “It's an open-and-shut – ”

“Nevertheless, we must speak to the others,” I said. “We decide everything as a group. Unless you want to start a precedent of us running off without discussing these things?”

Marco opened his mouth to reply, but something else filled the silence for him.

"HhhhrrrAAAAWWWWRRRR!"

"Oh, man," Marco said.

"Rachel," I said under my breath.

"We were down there a long time," Jake said. "Erek, I think a friend of ours may have come in to rescue us."

Erek shrugged. "I don't think it's going to be a problem."

"You don't know our friend," Marco said.

“Ax, if she's in thought-speak range, can you tell her to stand down?” Jake asked. The basement elevator stopped, and we tore up the stairway. We burst back into the utterly normal kitchen and raced into the utterly normal living room.

The front door of the house had been ripped off its hinges. The couch was thrown against one wall. And there, in the middle of the room, standing so tall its head scraped the ceiling, was a full-grown grizzly bear.

"HhhhRRAAAAWWRRR!" Rachel roared in rage and frustration.

Frustration, see, because the chee who passed as Erek's father had her in a full nelson. His human-holograph arms were wrapped around the unbelievably massive shoulders of the grizzly, and he was actually holding the great bear still. He had pinned a grizzly so powerful it could turn a Toyota into an aluminium can.

<You chee are very strong.> Ax commented in the biggest understatement of all time.

<Where have you been?!> Rachel demanded. <I waited as long as I could. I figured you were dead or something. And if you don't have a good explanation, you will be dead!>

"Oh, we have a story, all right," I assured her.

Rachel had calmed down and stopped roaring when she saw us. Now the chee slowly released her, and she began to change back out of morph.

Jake looked embarrassed and started to pull the couch back down. "Um, Erek, this is our friend Rachel."

"It was smart of you to keep a reserve," Erek commented, apparently not bothered by the grizzly bear home invasion. To Rachel he said, "I hope you weren't hurt."

"How come you can wrestle a grizzly if you have to be nonviolent?" I asked Erek.

"Of course, my 'father' here knew she was not a true bear. And he only held onto her. He did not destroy her. If Rachel had been strong enough to win, he would have had no choice but to allow himself to be destroyed."

I laughed. "I see why you want to change that."

"Yes," Erek said. Just that one word.

We left. In the doorway, I glanced back at the house. The perfectly normal-looking house with the basement elevator that led to a secret underground dog park full of pacifist robots. Some of whom wanted us to save them from their pacifist ways.

I wasn't sure I could.

On the way home, we filled Rachel and Tobias in on what had happened. It took a while. We were back at my barn before we were done.

"I say do it," Rachel said. "That chee guy held onto me like I was a baby. They're strong. They have technology we don't. They've already penetrated The Sharing. They would double our chances. End of story."

"No, not end of story," I protested. "What right do we have to interfere and destroy the thousands of years of peace this species has had? Didn't you hear Maria? No chee has ever taken another life. You want them to be saying a thousand years from now that no chee ever took a life until we made them killers?”

Marco glared at me. "What I don't want a thousand years from now is for people to be saying, 'too bad about the humans. They ended up as dead as the pemalites.'"

"Ax?" Jake asked. "You haven't said much."

Ax still wasn't very good at human expressions. But he looked troubled. He didn't meet Jake's eyes. "As you know, we andalites are not supposed to interfere in the lives of other species. I am already breaking that law with you. And I am proud to be breaking that law in this case. But the chee... chee! It makes a funny sound, doesn't it? Chee." He smiled briefly, then grew serious again. "The chee are a different species. Older than andalites. I feel... badly... helping another species to become violent."

Rachel said, "Look, no one likes violence. All right? But we didn't ask for this war with the yeerks. When the bad guys come after you, when they start the violence, they leave you no choice: fight or die."

"Fight or die," Marco agreed. "And you want proof? Look at the pemalites. They didn't fight, they died. All gone. No more. Scratch a whole species. Now their 'essence," whatever that means, is stuck inside dogs, and their robots feed them extra kibble. Yippee. That worked out real well for them. And even that's better off than we'll be if we lose to the yeerks."

"Law of the jungle," Rachel said. "You eat or you get eaten."

<Maybe so,> Tobias said, speaking up for the first time. <But still, wouldn't it be nice if that wasn't the law?>

"How can you take that attitude?" Marco demanded. "You're a predator. You know how it is."

“No!” I snapped. “It isn't! You guys keep throwing around phrase like that as if it justifies things. 'Oh, it's okay, we're animals and animals kill things.' 'It's the law of the jungle.' 'Nature, red in tooth and claw.' It's rubbish, absolute rubbish, and if any of you bothered to actually study the planet we're trying to defend, you'd know that. You want to talk about survival? Like Ax said, the pemalites were older than the andalites. They were incalculably older than humans. That they're dead now is irrelevant. Everything, _everything_ , dies eventually. But they lived so very, very long without violence, without war. Their pacifist stance failed once; once, in a history so much longer than that of our species. What you guys are doing is... is like watching a surgeon perform a hundred miracle cures, and then lose a single patient, and then pointing at him and going 'see, he's a terrible surgeon, that patient died!' A few hundred chee came to our planet and they've survived through our war-torn past without hurting, without killing. Now, I don't know how that works. I don't understand it. I don't understand it because I have a conflict-drunk little primate brain whose first response to everything is to turn it into a possibly violent competition. But I do think we should consider the validity of the pemalite strategy before venturing out to blindly destroy it.”

I realised that I was breathing quite hard. And everybody was staring at me, including Ax. I sat on a bale of hay and avoided eye contact with everyone.

“The other day, Tom invited me to The Sharing,” Marco said quietly. “He wanted me to bring my father. I thought maybe it was just an opportunistic thing, but this Matcom company that's working with this computer? My dad works for them. That has to be why they want him. And you can go on about the value of peace and about how much you want to preserve the innocence of these robots as much as you want, but if we take this pemalite crystal, maybe my dad isn't involved with Matcom anymore. And maybe the yeerks find someone else to infest.”

That did cause a potential problem.

<We could just take the crystal and not give it to the chee,> Tobias suggested.

“I don't like our chances of getting it without chee help,” Jake pointed out. “Erek gave the impression that it was pretty heavily guarded.”

And of course, we were ignoring a rather significant issue; with or without Marco's dad being involved, the yeerks creating a supercomputer that could take over all of earth's computers was kind of a big deal. No matter what, we couldn't let that project succeed.

The question of the chee might have to wait. Because with or without them, giving them the gift of violence or not, we definitely needed that crystal to be out of yeerk hands.

I walked down to the far end of the barn and came back carrying a small cage. "Total darkness, can't touch walls, floor, or ceiling, and you have to travel through a room strung with sensitive wires you can't even see." I held up the cage. "Meet the animal that can do all that."

It was no larger than a small rat with its leathery wings folded back.

"Cool," Marco said. "First I'm Spiderman, now I get to be Batman."

I shook my head. “We need to plan this. Carefully. We should take more time to think on it.”

“Cassie's right,” Jake said. “We need more information from Erek. We need to come up with a proper plan to get them this crystal.”

Or a plan where we wouldn't need to.


	10. Chapter 10

The next morning, before school, I went to see Ax.

The sun was just rising as I walked into his clearing. Ax was standing by the small stream that ran past his scoop, staring straight ahead with all four eyes, which was unusual. Ax normally uses his stalk eyes to scan the environment if he doesn't have at least two things to keep track of. But he turned to look at me at my approach.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I'll come back later.”

<It's alright,> he said. <Stay. I will be free soon.>

Ax has a morning ritual. Apparently all _arisths_ and warriors do it. He showed it to us once. I backed away to the edge of the clearing where I wouldn't distract him, and because he didn’t seem to mind my presence, sat down to watch.

Fortunately, it's a short ritual. Ax dipped his hoof in the stream to drink. <From the water that gave birth to us,> he said in open, but quiet, thoughtspeak. I had to wonder whether he would've spoken out loud normally, or if it was for my benefit.

<From the grass that feeds us,> he said, and moved back to crush a small tuft of grass beneath the same hoof. <For the freedom that unites us.> He spread his arms wide. <We rise to the stars.> He looked with all four eyes at the rising sun. A few seconds later, he turned back to me. <Good morning, Cassie.>

“Good morning, Ax.” I walked forward into the clearing.

<Do you need my help with anything?>

“No. Well, yes. I wanted... I wanted to ask you about andalite culture, actually.”

Ax narrowed his eyes cautiously. He'd made an effort to be more open with us since the Visser Three assassination attempt, but he still took andalite laws seriously. He couldn't share technology with me, or anything that would greatly affect the course of human culture, and we both knew it. But he let me talk.

“Andalites have been space-faring for a long time now, yes?”

<Yes,> Ax said, pride evident in his voice. He didn't volunteer how long, though.

“How did you get there?”

<What do you mean?>

“I mean, humans had the space race, right? We've been learning about it in school. Most of our big leaps forward were made during the war. Countries racing each other. Did andalites have anything like that?”

<No. Pass-Cheiftainess Artil-Meraille-Chestron headed the project to put the first living andalites in space. She believed that the exposure to raw sunlight without the planet's natural radiation shielding could increase the growth potential of certain grass varieties. But scientists would need to be deployed outside the atmosphere to oversee the project.>

“And there was just one project? No competition?”

<Several groups became involved. But they didn't work in competition.>

“Okay, thanks.” I turned to leave.

<Is... is that all you wanted to know?>

“Yeah.” I paused. “But, I noticed that you didn't say much about Erek's plan. You said you didn't want to help another species become violent, but we can't let the yeerks hold onto this crystal. Do you think we should do it or not?”

<I think it is a human decision.>

“Why? This has nothing to do with the fact that we're humans. He's asking us because we're what's available. And you're one of us. What do you think?”

<I think... I don't know what I think.> Ax pawed at the ground with one hoof. <The chee are technologically very advanced. They would make powerful allies. And every species has the right to be able to defend themselves. Yeerk war or not, that is what we would be giving them.>

“But?”

<But I cannot stop thinking about Seerow. He thought that the yeerks would make good allies. He thought that every species had the right to see the stars.>

I nodded. “The chee are a wonderful species. I mean, we haven't seen much, but what we have seen is a pacifistic race who just want to live in peace and have fun. If we turn them into killers...” I shook my head. “They might be the best ally we can get against the yeerks. They might turn into something worse than the yeerks. We just don't know.”

<But,> Ax said thoughtfully, <this is not the same as Seerow. What this Erek is asking for is not foreign technology. It is technology that already belonged to the chee. Or at least the pemalites. Perhaps... perhaps it is not our choice to make. This is a chee matter. Our duty is to prevent the yeerks from limiting their potential, as we try to do for humans.>

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I guess you're right.”

But something about his logic bothered me.


	11. Chapter 11

I still had a couple of hours before school. I rushed through my chores, dug up my notes in the forest, and sat down under the tree marked “Jake + Cassie” to write out my thoughts.

But they just wouldn't assemble themselves in ways that were easy to write.

I knew that if I voted to leave well enough alone, I would be outvoted. I knew that we had no choice but to get the crystal out of yeerk hands. So really, it didn't matter what I thought. I could put my notes away, do the mission, and not think too hard about what exactly we were doing, or why. It wouldn't make a scrap of practical difference whether I sat down and puzzled things out or not.

But that wasn't the point.

I was pretty sure that Erek wasn't intentionally strong-arming us into acting as his personal muscle. His people had infiltrated the yeerks, and when he found us, he must've seen an opportunity for mutual benefit. I had to wonder if he'd lain awake at night puzzling how to get the pemalite crystal out of yeerk hands. (Did androids even sleep?) Marco falling from the sky must've seemed like a miracle.

And I guess finding the chee was a miracle for us, too. Even without their plan to join us in battle, we wouldn't have known about the yeerk supercomputer without them. I was pretty sure Erek wasn't trying to deliberately force us into a position where we had to help him become violent to protect our own planet from the yeerks. Our planet simply needed protection, and that was the best available route forward.

I was pretty sure.

But then, holographic technology or not, the chee had somehow survived among humans for thousands of years without being able to cause any harm, even to defend themselves. They'd survived invasions and slavers and military drafts without raising a hand to anyone. Erek himself was moving among unsuspecting Controllers without the ability to fight. That had to involve strategy. That had to involve thinking ahead. I knew the chee were technologically sophisticated, but to do something like that, they also needed to be incredibly smart.

I thought of the yeerk, trapped in its little cage of wires in Erek's robot head.

I'd asked if it was in pain.

'No,' he'd said, 'my programming forbids that.' He'd said it as if he didn't really care.

I'd killed yeerks. I'd killed the innocent slaves of yeerks. I'd hurt and killed more sentient beings than I could recall off the top of my head. That was what we had to do, on the battlefield.

I'd killed plain old Earth animals. And not just by losing control of morphs. I'd gone out of my way to kill sharks, on purpose.

I'd tied Jake up in the woods and waited with him while an enemy agent starved to death in his brain.

So I wasn't really in a position to judge Erek's methods. He'd imprisoned a single yeerk, kept it fed and pain-free, and infiltrated the Sharing completely non-violently.

Why, then, did the memory of his answer to my question send a little chill down my spine?


	12. Chapter 12

We'd planned to talk business with Erek a few days after our introduction to the underground dog park. So we still had a couple of days to think about things. After recording everything I'd learned about the chee, I buried my notes again and went to school. I sat through classes and tried to look like I was paying attention. The bell rang. I headed for home.

Maria was loitering at the school gates. I approached her.

“Hi, Maria.”

She turned to meet me. “It is Cassie, yes?”

I nodded.

“I'm sorry to intrude on you like this. I wanted to talk to you.”

“That's good. I was hoping to talk to you, too. You know, without the others.”

She smiled. “Then you must allow me to buy you a drink. There is a coffee shop nearby.”

We headed for the coffee shop, where we each ordered a hot chocolate. Quietly, I said, “We can't talk in the open.”

Maria seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then her hologram disappeared and I was looking at a chee indistinguishable (to my eyes) from Erek. I glanced around to see if anybody had noticed. But the world around us was somehow shimmery, hazy.

“I have extended my hologram to include us both,” she explained. “Any who look at us will see us engaged in a conversation about the cartoon sitcom The Simpsons.”

“Will that work?” I asked.

Maria tilted her robot dog face in my direction. Metal and ivory shifted into what looked to me like a tolerant expression, although I wasn't certain how to read chee expressions. “Yes. We have been doing this a long time.”

“Right.”

“You seemed... uncertain about Erek's plan.”

“I don't like it,” I admitted. “I mean, I'm just a human kid here. But what he's asking us to do is basically take a bunch of people older than our species, people who have never hurt or killed anyone in thousands, maybe millions of years, and make them like us.”

Maria nodded. “Yes. You understand.”

“But on the other hand...” I bit my lip. “On the other hand, my species is at risk here. So is yours. We Animorphs fight because we have no choice, but I can't be sure we're going to win. I don't... I don't think we're going to win. I mean, our job is to slow the invasion down, to hold our ground until the andalites get here. But we hardly do that. We've annoyed the yeerks a little. We caused a bit of a delay when they had to get a new Kandrona in. We've made Visser Three look bad. That's it. And your species, too...” I met her dark crystal eyes with my own. “I mean, if you're all that's left of the chee, and all that's left of the pemalites...”

“Turning us into killers would destroy the legacy of the pemalites as surely as anything the yeerks could do,” Maria said firmly. “And I'm not sure that any chee who takes the path of violence can call themselves a chee any more. There is more than one way to kill a species.” She fiddled idly with her cup of hot chocolate. Her hands, I noticed, weren't dog-like, but they weren't human-like either. Three long, fine metal fingers on each hand and one opposable thumb, buried much higher in the wrist than my own. The fiddling gesture was very humanlike, though. I wondered if she'd picked it up from us. “Erek should not have approached you. He should not have made this your problem.”

“We won't tell anyone about you,” I said quickly.

“I know. Erek's friends are not the only ones who have been watching your activity against the yeerks. But you must have thought through the implications of this. We work hard not to be noticed. We have to, because secrecy is our only defence. What do you think would happen if the yeerks discovered the chee?”

I hadn't thought of that. I felt sick. It must have shown on my face.

“Exactly. And now that our secrets are in your brains...”

“We can't ever be taken,” I whispered. “None of us. Already losing a single one of us to the yeerks would've compromised the Animorphs, but now...”

“But now he has made our safety your responsibility, too. Not to mention the benefit our technology, on top of your morph capability, would provide the yeerks. Sometimes he does not think things through. I must apologise for this.”

“It's not all his fault,” I said. “We were monitoring him. We already knew that something was up. If he hadn't told us, we probably would've gotten into worse trouble trying to find the truth.”

“There are hundreds of safer, believable lies that we could have used. You did not need to be roped into this. He could have found ways to help you from the sidelines without revealing himself. And now...” she shook her head. “Your friends seemed very determined to follow Erek's plan.”

“Jake's brother is one of them. They're after Marco's dad. They're just trying to protect their families.”

“So is Erek. And so am I.”

“Erek's plan aside, we can't let the yeerks keep that crystal.”

“Yes, that is also true. But you do not need to give it to Erek. He can't make you, after all.”

“We need Erek to get it. We can't exactly promise to help him and then just take the thing.”

“Erek has made his knowledge of the defences public knowledge amongst the chee. I can help you get the crystal.”

“So we give it to you instead?”

“It is probably better that you don't.”

“Isn't you using Erek's information to keep the crystal from him kind of cheating in the same way that us going back on a deal with him would be?”

Maria frowned. At least I think it was a frown. “Erek shared this information to better get the crystal out of yeerk hands. My knowledge of it is not conditional on his foolhardy reprogramming plan.”

I didn't press the matter. Whatever passed for fair play between chee was their own business. “I'll try to convince my friends that you're right,” I said, standing up.

“And if you cannot?”

I shrugged. “Then I guess you have your work cut out for you, trying to convince _your_ friends.”


	13. Chapter 13

We all met up at Rachel's that night. I told the others about my conversation with Maria.

“You went behind our backs?” Marco asked, sounding angry.

“I didn't go behind anybody's back. She was waiting for me and wanted to talk. I went along with her.”

“But you're on her side.”

“I'm not on anyone's side. I agree with her, though.”

“Cassie,” Rachel said patiently, “None of us like violence. But we say that as people who have the capacity to defend ourselves and our planet. Don't the chee deserve that same right?”

I could have mentioned that she wasn't so keen on letting people defend their own planet when we'd recruited Melissa. But I held my tongue. There was no reason to be mean.

“Besides which, we kinda need their help,” Marco added. “I don't know if you guys noticed, but we are losing this war.”

“So we just throw another species under the bus to turn the tide?” I asked.

“Making another species more capable of surviving is not throwing it under the bus,” Marco said patiently. “It is the exact opposite of throwing it under the bus.”

“So Tobias is a dinosaur then, huh?”

Marco just blinked at me. “I don't... I don't even know what that means. That's not even an argument. It's just a random sentence.”

I didn't bother explaining. “Look, we need to get the pemalite crystal away from the yeerks. That much is definite. We stop this Matcom thing, yeerks don't take over all the computers, and everybody wins. I just don't think that we necessarily need to make a race of killers after that.”

“'Race of killers' is a little overdramatic,” Jake protested.

“No, it isn't. Humans are a race of killers, after all.”

Marco rubbed his temples. “Humans are at _war_ , Cassie. We can't play nice. We need all the help we can get.”

“And after the war, we'll be sharing the planet with a bunch of sophisticated androids who have only just discovered violence,” I said.

“If you're trying to suggest that the chee are just going to turn into a bunch of crazy killer robots – ” Rachel began.

“No, probably not. Although we can't be certain. But Rachel, we've all seen you in bear morph when you get mad.”

Rachel glared at me, like I'd struck a low blow. I had. “That's – ”

“It's what? Someone dealing with abilities and impulses that their mind simply isn't designed to handle? Kinda like if you built a really sophisticated robot with a functioning and consistent mind with no concept of violence, and then exposed it to a lot of violence, and then taught it to commit violence? After the war – ”

“There's the magic phrase,” Marco said. “'After the war'. See, the problem here, Cassie, is that without the chee, I'm not seeing an 'after the war'. Frankly, I'd love to deal with all the consequences of our mistakes after the war. It'd mean we'd _made it through the war_. And I'm not going to throw away our chance at winning, at saving our own species, because of what it _might_ do to some chee and their precious pemalite legacy.”

I glanced at Ax. I knew he understood. But he was busy examining a small china doll on Rachel's nightstand.

I glanced at Tobias. He was preening his wing in the windowsill, but he stopped to meet my gaze. <I think we should think about this some more,> he said. <I don't like the idea of doing this any more than anyone else does. But... I don't know how much time we have, before this computer is built. And... and Marco's right. What's worse, helping a species become violent, or not helping a species be free?>

I was outvoted. We all knew it. We took the vote over whether to help Erek anyway.

I still voted 'no'. It was the principle of the thing.

Truth be told, I wasn't worried about the chee. My objection to helping Erek had nothing to do with fanciful predictions of unleashing killer robots on the universe. I figured that chee who could commit violence would act like normal chee at best and like reserved humans who preferred to avoid conflict at worst. Not that I really had the information to draw that kind of conclusion.

But I had wanted to see what the others thought. I'd wanted to hear what they said about 'after the war'. I'd heard so many justifications for what we did. Yes, we were at war. Yes, we had to kill. But I was getting a little tired of the 'survival of the fittest' and 'they're attacking so everything we do is okay' rhetoric that kept getting thrown around. And I could see, very clearly, what Maria was worried about. I could see why she didn't want Erek reprogramming her people in the image of those of their adoptive planet.

Humanity went into space as an act of war. A substitute for actual fighting, not a direct way to hurt anyone, but it was war that provided the drive, the public support.

Nuclear physics and nuclear energy were discovered by peaceful scientists. But they were funded and developed because governments wanted to make nuclear weapons. Those great leaps forward came out of war, and while the researchers may not have wanted it, they were immediately applied to war.

Penicillin, the world's first antibiotic, was a miracle drug when it was first discovered. My dad had once explained to me that it was discovered three times. Three times, somebody looked into a petri dish and saw the greatest drug ever discovered, that magically cured infections and saved millions of lives. It wasn't properly developed and marketed until the third time. It was too expensive. It wasn't worth it, merely to save human lives.

The third time, it was definitely considered worth it. Because the third time, we were at war. We needed a miracle drug to help our sick soldiers get better and kill more enemy soldiers. Without that war, we wouldn't have developed antibiotics.

It seemed that every major advance we made, every great leap forward, was an incidental side note to creating new ways to kill, or avoid being killed, or create public support for killing.

I wasn't worried about releasing violent chee on an unsuspecting galaxy.

I was worried about releasing violent humans on an unsuspecting galaxy.


	14. Chapter 14

We planned to go ahead with the plan the next weekend. Only one of us would be needed to traverse the room and get the crystal, so only one of us would have to morph a bat. The others all picked me. Big surprise.

I hadn't actually acquired the bat yet. I'd been putting it off. It was stupid of me. Whether we helped Erek or not, we still needed to get that crystal. But I'd been putting off acquiring the bat until we had a clear goal.

After the vote, there was no longer any excuse. I had a few days to acquire and practice with the morph before we needed to make the grab. It would be a planned attack, with us well-adjusted to our morphs.

So of course, the night after we took our vote, I got a call from Erek.

“Hi, Erek,” I said when my mom handed me the phone.

“Hi, Cassie. Say, that thing we were going to do on the weekend? Do you want to do it tonight instead?”

I swallowed. That couldn't be good. “Have you talked to Jake?”

“Yeah, he's rounding up the others and bringing them over.”

“Probably better to do it at my house. Better resources.” If there was some kind of last-minute change, I wanted a barn full of animals at the ready.

“Okay. See you in an hour?”

“See you then.” I hung up.

He wanted us to go in tonight. Something must have happened. Something drastic. Could mean the yeerks were just close to a breakthrough. Could mean that somebody had been kidnapped. I wouldn't know for an hour.

I could get a fair amount of practice in, in an hour.

I headed out to the barn and acquired the bat, shut myself into an empty stable, and focused.

I shrank.

I kept shrinking until I was just a few inches tall. I hadn't bothered to strip down beforehand, so I had to climb out of my own sock. The wooden floor beneath me looks pulpy and splintery so close up. Jagged shafts of wood bristled up from the floorboards, which were covered in a layer of dust. I really needed to be more thorough with my sweeping.

My body hair thickened, roughened, becoming the heavy down of a bat. I felt my feet stretch and my knees bow. My elbows crept up towards my shoulders and my thumbs moved up into my wrists.

Sproooot!

My fingers lengthened. They just shot out until they were the nearly the length of my entire body. Eight hairy but completely human fingers reaching to the floor. I heard crunching and grinding as the knuckles in my hands moved about.

I touched my fingers together, then spread them out. A fine gossamer sheet stretched between each, delicate as a soap bubble. It almost immediately thickened and hardened into a fine, delicate leather. My fingers thinned. I touched my arms to my sides, drawing out another sheet of leather, and the wings were complete.

I couldn't see the changes to my face. But I felt my sight dim. I felt my hearing sharpen.

I was a bat.

The bat brain didn't like the light in the shed. It wasn't panicking, but it yearned for somewhere safe. The bat should be home, sleeping. I probably shouldn't have turned the barn light on, but it was too late to worry about that now. I flapped my way outside, where the sun had just set. Bats are good fliers. They can't drift on a thermal like and osprey or float on a cushion of air above a wave like a seagull, but they can fly a pretty decent distance.

Once I was out in the open, my bat brain knew exactly what to do. I let off an echolocating burst and... _felt_ where surfaces were in front of me. The echolocation dragged up old but vivid memories of sand, of stone, jumbled images from Ax's distress signal all that time ago. The images were probably still fresh in my mind because I hadn't used echolocation since. That, or the message had done some kind of permanent damage. I hoped it was the former.

Echolocation showed me where major surfaces and obstacles were, but in the open sky, the bat wasn't all that interested in those. It was interested in the small moving specks flying around me. Insects. And echolocation showed me not just where they were, but how fast they were moving, and where to. I snatched a moth out of the air and ate it. Then it occurred to me what I'd just done, and I bore down on the bat brain, trying to get a grip.

The bat wasn't hard to control, really. It was hungry. It wanted to eat insects. It was a little frightened by the lack of other bats. If its brothers and sisters weren't about, was I in a dangerous area? I flapped off into the trees to round up Ax and Tobias. They were both asleep, but woke at my call. Bird of prey need to be alert all the time, even when sleeping. And Ax was trained to be randomly woken at stupid times.

By the time we got back, it was almost meeting time. I demorphed and got dressed while Tobias went out to head off Erek before he got to the house, and bring him to the barn instead.

Erek was the last to arrive, following Tobias. He looked tense.

“There's a problem,” he said. “The yeerks are putting in a brand new security system on top of the existing systems. I don't think it's active yet, but I can't find out what it is."

<Fine. We can wait a few weeks till you can get the details,> Tobias said.

"The crystal is already so well protected that any new system may put it beyond our grasp for good," Erek said. "And don't forget -- the yeerks are racing to use this crystal to create a computer system so powerful it can take over every computer on Earth. They're not there yet. But the longer we wait..."

"Oh, man, this sucks," Marco said. "No planning? No preparation? Just go in and hope for the best?"

<When do we not do that?> Tobias pointed out reasonably.

"I'll tell you everything I know," Erek said. "Listen carefully. It's not too complicated."

We all exchanged glances. This wasn't what we'd agreed to. It wasn't what we'd voted on. But while the level of danger had changed, the consequences of not acting were the same.

"Go or don't go?" Jake asked.

"Go," Rachel said, but with less enthusiasm than usual. A lot less.

"Go," Marco said. "But personally, I can't blame anyone who wants to sit this one out."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "I say go," I said. "I don't sit anything out, Marco."

<I'm not in,> Tobias said. <I'm useless on this mission, so I don't vote.>

<I go where Prince Jake goes.> Ax said.

"Don't call me 'prince,'" Jake said wearily for the thousandth time. "Okay, we go."

Erek immediately began telling us all he knew about Matcom and the security for the pemalite crystal. After about two minutes I think we were all ready to change our vote.

But by then it was too late. We had a mission. People depended on us.

Erek was not going with us. But he would be waiting outside Matcom when we came out. Assuming we came out.

The Matcom building was about 15 minutes away, by wing. It was one of those boring-looking, three-story glass and cement buildings you see in industrial parks everywhere. Just a bunch of blue glass rectangles with a big parking lot in back. In fact, it looked so much like every other boring square building in the industrial park, we had trouble finding it. We flew around, a lost gang of owls, for a good fifteen minutes before Rachel spotted the Matcom sign.

We landed on the roof of the building. Erek had assured us there were no cameras or guards up there.

"Let's find that pipe," Jake whispered as soon as we were all in our natural bodies again.

"Erek said southwest corner, right?" I said.

"Northwest," Jake said. He sounded sure.

"Which way is northwest?" Marco asked.

Ax laughed in thought-speak, till he realized he was serious. <You can't find directions?> He sounded shocked. Like he'd just discovered we had hidden tail blades. <It's that corner over there.>

The pipe was about three inches in diameter.

“I still think we should go in as flies,” Jake muttered. “This would be easier as flies.”

<Unless you meet a nice, big spider in the vents,> Tobias pointed out. He was going to keep watch from outside, as usual.

Marco crouched over the pipe and peered down into darkness. "I hope this works," he muttered. "I don't even know if my Spiderman can make silk."

"Spiderwoman," I said. "Your spider morph is female. Wolf spiders don't make webs, but they do make silk. It should work."

"Easy for you say. I don't even know how to turn on the silk thing."

Ax was already morphing into the wolf spider, so I hurried to catch up. By the time Ax, Marco I were in spider morph, the others had become cockroaches.

<Man, you two are ugly at this scale,> Rachel said. <Jeez, I don't ever need to see another spider my own size again.>

<We're ugly? You want to know what you look like right now? You look like dinner.> Marco said, laughing evilly. <Juicy cockroach. This spider morph is hungry, and you look tasty.>

<Marco, get a grip,> Jake said patiently. <Let's do this.>

<I'll demorph and step on your ugly butt.> Rachel growled.

From where I was standing in the gravel of the rooftop, the pipe looked like a round skyscraper. It extended above the roof by about a foot, which is quite a distance when you're half an inch high.

I scampered around the pipe. One side had been splashed with tar. It would be easy to grip. I raced easily up the pipe to stand precariously on the lip. I could feel a breeze blowing up from the blackness beneath me. It was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The pipe went down through all three stories and an extra underground story. Four floors. Bad enough when you're human size. A million miles when you're a spider.

Ax and Marco came crawling up to teeter alongside me.

<Okay,> I said, <Now comes the fun part.>

I tried to search the spider brain, looking for the subtle, secret signals that would start me spinning silk. Fortunately, the spider wasn't exactly Albert Einstein. It only knew how to do about four things, one of which was spin silk.

The spider body sort of... well... pushed out a strand of gooey white filament. It stuck to the edge of the pipe.

Ax and Marco did the same.

<Well, this is certainly disgusting,> Marco said.

I ignored him. <You guys ready?>

<Yeah.>

<Yes.>

<Then... Yeeeeee-Haaaaahhh!> I sprang from the lip of the pipe into the darkness.

I fell slowly down, down, down, twisting and turning my way down the pipe. Behind me a long white string grew. It braked my fall, so that I was dropping in slow motion. The spider eyes were not bad at seeing in the relative dark. A bit ofmoonlight followed us down part of the way as we dropped.

And then it started being fun. I kicked away from the side of the pipe and cartwheeled through the air. My web looped around Ax's and Marco's, and soon we were weaving a weird silk rope.

It was cool in a way . . . till I felt a certain emptiness.

<Guys! I'm running out of web.>

<Yes, me, too.>

<How far do you think we've dropped?>

<I don't know.>

<You know which way is northwest but you don't know how far we've dropped? We could still have two stories to go,> Marco said.

<I think our plan has a minor flaw,> Ax said with his usual understatement. <But we are very light, small creatures. We should survive a fall. So should the others in cockroach morph.>

<Maybe,> Marco said. <See, the problem is, there's only one way to find out if we'll survive. By dropping.>

Ax didn't say anything.

<No choice,> I said.

I cut the strand of web.

And I fell. Down through the darkness, toward a landing I could only hope wouldn't kill me.

It was a long drop.

<Aaaaahhhhhhh!>

<Aaaaahhhhhhh!>

<Aaaaahhhhhhh!>

WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

We hit something hard. We bounced. We hit again.

WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

<You okay?> Jake called down.

<Oh, yeah, we're great,> Marco said. <I fell about a billion feet and landed on a steel trampoline. Couldn't be better.>

<Sarcasm,> Rachel commented coolly. <He must be okay.>

<Laugh now, Rachel. We'll see how much you laugh when it's your turn.>

The plan was for the three of us to create a silk cable the others in cockroach morph would be able to climb down.

<We're coming down.> Jake said. <When we reach the end of the silk we'll jump. If you two survived, we will. Nothing kills a cockroach.>

<Why don't you stand right beneath me, Marco?> Rachel suggested. <You can break my fall.>

Marco, Ax and I scurried out of the way. A few seconds later, after they had clambered down to the end of our silk...

WHAP! WHAP! Two cockroaches landed nearby.

<Where are we?> Jake asked.

<It's pretty dark. Who knows?> I answered. <It's a heating/air-conditioning vent, I guess. Erek said it would be part of the furnace system. Supposedly we go west a hundred feet or so, then drop down, then go across the furnace, then down again, then right. Then we're at the edge of the High Security Room, where the real trouble starts.>

<Excuse me? Did someone say furnace?> Marco asked.

<Yeah. I said furnace.>

<Does it occur to any of you that the furnace might actually come on?> Marco said.

<Not till right this minute,> I said.

<It's not very cold out,> Rachel pointed out.

We scrabbled along the steel floor, three spiders and two cockroaches. Our rough claws seemed to make a horrible din on the metal, scuffing and scratching. But it probably wouldn't have sounded like anything to a human.

As we ran, there was more and more dust on the floor of the vent. It was weird, like walking through dried leaves. My eight legs kicked through it, and it swirled behind me as I passed. Eventually the dust became as thick as a carpet, although in reality it was probably no more than a few millimetres thick.

Every ten feet or so there would be a grilled opening. Through the massive upright bars I could see offices. The light in the offices was very dim, just the glow of computer screen savers and red or green function lights. But it helped us to find our way through the darkness of the vent.

Then...

<What's that?> Rachel yelled. She was the farthest back. <Uh-oh. Something coming! I feel the vibrations! Something big!>

She took off. I took off. We all took off.

Now I could feel the vibrations, too. Quick, confused-sounding footsteps. And a dragging sound, like something was being hauled.

I ran. To my left, another spider. Ax. Ahead of me, Marco and Jake. Rachel was just back to my right. I couldn't exactly turn and glance over my shoulder. I had no shoulder. And I had no actual head to turn. So I paused, spun around, and in the dim light from a vent, I saw it.

Huge. Twenty times my size! A vast, horrible menace.

<A rat!> I yelled. <It's a RAT!>

The thing I'd heard dragging was its naked tail and furred abdomen. It was hungry, and it was after us. And, unfortunately, it was faster than me.

<Go! Go! Go! It's gaining!> I yelled.

We blew at top spider and cockroach speed. Which seems really fast when you're an inch long, but isn't really that many miles per hour. A rat can do maybe five or six miles per hour. A spider is lucky to break one mph.

<We'll have to morph back!> Jake said.

<Not in here!> I cried. <Not enough room.>

<Next vent,> Jake said. <We go out through the next vent.>

The next vent was about ten feet away. I couldn't turn around to look at the rat, but every hair on my spider body told me it was just inches behind me. Yet there was something else making my hair tingle, too. Something about the breeze...

<YAAHHH!> I heard Jake yell.

A split second later, my spider legs were clawing air. It was like a Roadrunner cartoon. I zoomed out into space, seemed to hang there with my little feet motoring away, and then I fell.

<Oh, yes,> Ax said calmly. <Erek mentioned we had to go down again.>

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

We hit steel again, and each impact sent dust clouds swirling.

<Keep running!> I cried, unnecessarily.

Buh-Booooom!

The rat dropped behind us! It was still after us! Fortunately, it was a little stunned by the impact, whereas we were outta there!

Suddenly, ahead of us, the steel floor opened up again. But instead of a drop into darkness, there was a weird, vast plain of jagged spires. Each of the spires was steel, three times as tall as my little spider body. Each metal spire opened at the top. There were hundreds of them, all arranged in perfect rows. A foul smell, something my spider mind knew nothing about, came from this field of spires.

A weird, flickering glow lit the landscape. In the eerie light, it looked like some awful graveyard, with the spires like industrial-strength gravestones or something. I mean, it was creepy.

<What is that?> I asked.

<Let's just get going, all right?> Rachel suggested. <We can sightsee some other time.>

I would never have walked into that "field" if the rat hadn't been just two feet back and gaining again. I didn't need spider senses to know there was danger here. It screamed danger.

I stuck out one spider leg and touched the top of the nearest spire. Then another and another. I walked from spire to spire, carefully, cautiously. The cockroaches crawled and squirmed through the valleys between spires. Unable to stand normally, they had to drag themselves inch by inch.

<What is this?> I asked again.

<You don't want to know.> Jake said grimly. <Let's just get out of here, okay?>

Right then it hit me. From the tone of Jake's thought-speak voice.

<Oh, man. This is the furnace, isn't it? These spires... the holes in the tops of them... it's where the gas comes out!>

<Not if no one turns on the heat,> Rachel said grimly.

Over my head now, I saw the source of the eerie glow. It was the pilot light. It was a jet of blue flame as long as my body. I could feel the heat from it, even though it seemed to be as far above my head as the ceiling of a cathedral.

The rat, smarter than we were, decided to stop at the edge of the furnace. But there was no going back. We had to cross the furnace. We had to hope the Matcom Corporation was into energy conservation and didn't waste heat. We had to pray that no one had messed with the thermostat. Because if the heat came on...

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

<Gas!>

The gas blew with hurricane force up through the tops of the spires. In seconds the gas would rise to the pilot light. In seconds the entire landscape would erupt in flame!

I thought I'd been moving as fast as I could move. I was wrong. I had a whole extra speed.

Ahead of me I saw Jake, Rachel, and Ax all reach safety. Only Marco and I were still deadly inches away from safety.

<RUN! RUN! RUNRUNRUNRUN!>

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Then . . . WHOOOOOOSH!

Fuh-Wwwuuuummmp!

The whole world seemed to explode around me. A wall of flame... a hurricane of hot air. I was blown head over heels, somersaulting through air as hot as an oven. I somersaulted backward, hit steel floor again, and screeched like a skidding car. I plowed straight into Jake, and a split second later, Marco plowed straight into me.

<Cassie! Cassie! Are you okay?> Jake asked.

<Yes, yes. I think so. Who can tell in this body?>

<I'm okay, too,> Marco said. <You know, just in case anyone cares.>

<I guess they like to keep this building nice and warm, eh?> Rachel said.

<That was very close to being a disaster,> Ax said. <We should thank the rat. If it had not chased us, we would have been crossing those gas jets several seconds later.>

That was not a nice picture to think of.

<That would have left a big wad of Marco mass floating in Z-space,> Marco muttered. I really wished he'd stop joking about that.

The rest of the trip through the heating and air-conditioning system was calm. But that just gave me time to think about the close call. One second slower, and I'd have gone out as a roasted spider.

<There are walls up here,> Jake warned from the head of our little pack of singed bugs. <No, wait, not walls. Like a maze. Like Erek said.>

We travelled through a series of switchbacks, around a steel panel, then back around another. It was a light-blocking system. It would block out every last photon of light that might come through the vent.

Then we came to the edge of a drop. Beyond it, I knew, was the High Security Room itself – the location of the pemalite crystal. We were six feet up. We had to drop, and then stay within two feet of the wall. Any movement farther toward the center of the huge room, and we would set off pressure sensors in the floor.

By this time, we were used to falling.

<Next I want to try jumping out of a plane. Without a parachute,> Marco said as we stepped into the black void.

It is an eerie experience falling in total darkness. You have no idea where the floor is. It's almost like you're not falling at all. Until you hit the bottom, that is.

<Stay close to the wall,> Jake reminded everyone. <Hug the wall and demorph. We do not want to get trapped in these morphs. Cassie, you're up.>

I still had to morph the bat.

I was relieved to be human again. But my human eyes were no better than spider eyes at penetrating the darkness. It was darker than any night. Darker than hiding in a closet at midnight.

This was the darkness of being buried alive.

"There could be six hork-bajir standing three inches away, and we wouldn't know it," Marco said, in a whisper that seemed to be deadened by the darkness itself.

"That's a nice thought," Rachel said dryly.

I ignored them, and focused on the bat. I felt myself shrink. I felt the itch of bat fur sprouting. I saw nothing, but I knew the transformation was complete when the instincts rose in my mind. I opened my mouth, and let out an echolocating shriek.

I saw wires.

The strung the entire room, anchored to the corners and edges around us. About a foot in, the wire network became dense, a spider web of crisscrossing filaments.

<Nobody move,> I warned. <Some of the wires are anchored around us.>

I echolocated again. There was a pedestal in the middle of the room, a little rectangular podium. Wires, thicker than the pressure-sensing wires, lead up to it. But between it and me were wires. A lot of wires.

Could the bat fly through such a thing? I guessed there was no choice but to trust it to do the flying.

<Okay. Here goes.> I fired an echolocating burst and took off.

Fired again! There were tight strings all around me!

Left!

Left again!

Down!

No, up!

Right, left, right, right, straight up!

Again and again the high-pitched sound machine gun fired. Again and again I dodged, millimeters from a wire.

It was insane! It was so fast my human brain was three steps behind. It was instantaneous. It was impossible! The speed, the agility, the instant translation of the echolocating blasts.

And suddenly, I was through! I was through the wires. I landed on the platform in the center of the room. It was all over in ten seconds of lunatic flight.

<Okay, now that is a roller-coaster ride! Yes!> I said, incredibly jazzed from having made it. <Yes!>

The crystal sat in the center of a nest of electrical wires. None of them were touching the crystal itself. It just sat out in the open, where anyone could grab it.

I picked it up in one foot. My long bat toes curled around it, holding it securely.

The return journey was no less thrilling. Jake jumped a little when I landed on his shoulder, but didn't touch anything. <Got it,> I said.

“Right,” Jake said. “Let's remorph and get out of here.”

<Um.>

“'Um'?” Marco asked. “No, no 'um'. I don't like 'um'.”

“What?” Rachel said. “What's the problem?”

<We took a few falls in that drain to get in here. Even assuming the boiler is off, and we could be waiting hours for them to turn the boiler off, how are we going to get back _up_ those parts of the drain? >

Everyone was silent for about five seconds.

“Flies,” Rachel said. “We'll fly out.”

<Flies won't be able to carry the crystal. Neither will roaches.>

“Ah,” Jake said. “Uhm. We could...”

But he didn't get to finish the thought, because right then, alarms started sounding.

Dreeet! Dreeet! Dreeet!

I don't know what set them off. Maybe somebody touched a wire. Maybe the combined infrared light put off by our bodies set off the sensors. Maybe the rat in the pipes triggered something. There was no time to wonder.

“Battle morphs!” Jake snapped. “Priority is protecting Cassie and that crystal! Let's go!”

I knew I'd have no time to demorph and remorph. I'd have to stay a bat, and protect the crystal as best I could. A tiny aerial soldier, one heavy hit away from death, with only my agility to protect me.

This must be what Tobias felt like. At least he had talons to fight with.

A door opened across the room and light flooded in, blinding all of us. It was the tiniest amount of light, not nearly enough for a human to see clearly, but after the complete darkness it was still too much. The resulting growls and snarls of pain and irritation suggested that at least nobody was human when it did. I shut my eyes and let off an echolocating burst. The doorway was crowded with human-Controllers.

<Straight ahead guys, door on the opposite side of the room. Careful of the pedestal.>

I dropped onto Rachel's brown, shaggy shoulder. She drew herself up to full grizzly height, pointed herself towards the door, and charged forward. Dracon beams lanced the air around us. One hit Rachel's arm just a few inches below me; I felt the heat of smouldering fur and flesh.

The relative darkness of the room protected us, and by the time we got to the doorway the Controllers had, wisely, chosen to vacate it. We were in a very short hallway, with a heavy steel door at the end of it. Rachel charged. The door was torn from its frame and thrown aside. It was much too bright for me to see clearly. I fired off another pulse of sound.

There were twenty human-Controllers forming a neat semicircle around us. All of them had automatic weapons. Behind them, a couple of dozen hork-bajir.

There was a huge window taking up the entire right wall, separating my tiny bat body from the dark open air that it craved. The door Rachel threw aside hit it, and bounced off the glass. Not ordinary glass, then. No way out there.

The humans all levelled their guns at us.

<Hork-bajir?> Rachel asked. Her bear vision wasn't great.

<Yep,> Marco confirmed.

<How many?>

<Too many.>

A human-Controller stepped out in front. So far as I could tell, she was a nice-looking, middle-aged woman wearing normal street clothes. She could have been someone's grandmother.

"So. The andalite bandits," she said. There was tension in her voice, but she tried to sound calm. "You've done me a big favor. When I turn you over to Visser Three he'll promote me two grades. Maybe three!"

<Or he may decide to destroy you for letting us get this far.> Ax said coolly.

"Surrender. You can't escape," the woman snapped. "I'd rather take you alive, but the Visser would still be happy to have your corpses."

We stared at her. And we stared at the muzzles of the twenty automatic rifles that were levelled at us.

I hopped as far forward on Rachel's shoulder as I could. I lifted the pemalite crystal, so that the Controllers could see it.

The woman stiffened immediately. "Give me that."

I shook my tiny bat head.

"Lower those guns," the woman snapped.

"What?" some guy behind her yelled. "We have them! We have them cold!"

The woman's jaw twitched again, but she stayed in control. "What do you think a bullet would do to that crystal?"

"But the odds that a bullet would hit the crystal... It's not going to happen."

The woman smiled grimly. "That crystal is worth more than the mother ship and everything in it," she said. Then she started yelling. "You want to shoot? Go ahead, fool! If you hit the crystal, you can explain it to Visser Three."

She got a grip on herself while the guy who had spoken out decided he was not interested in explaining anything to Visser Three. "All human-Controllers, back. Weapons on safety," the woman snapped. The rifles faltered, then lowered toward the ground. But I knew better than to breathe a sigh of relief. See, I knew what was coming next.

The woman looked right at me and smiled. "Hork-bajir, forward."

Two dozen hork-bajir stepped forward.

That was at least a dozen more than we had any hope of defeating.

<Cassie, get out of here,> Jake said. <No matter what, we can't let them have the crystal.>

<No. If I take the crystal out, there's nothing to stop them from shooting at you.> I transferred the crystal to my mouth and gripped Rachel's shoulder tightly with my little bat feet.

And then we were fighting.

I couldn't echolocate with the crystal in my mouth, so I couldn't discern much of what was happening. A bright, crowded brawl is no place for a bat. I saw blades, heard growls; humans scampered out of the way as the fight quickly spread to take up most of the room. I dropped the crystal at one point and it disappeared beneath trampling feet, but I don't think anyone noticed. I was thrown against the window as I echolocated frantically, searching of the little crystal. All I got back was a picture made mostly of panes of glass.

I did learn a couple of things, though.

One, there was a small pane missing from the window. Too small for even my bat body to fit through. But big enough for sound waves.

Two, there was something outside the window.

It looked like an open, empty night. But I definitely felt something. An invisible bulk, like a thick pole. And the... texture... of it was nothing that either my human or my bat brain recognised.

Something about how the sounds bounced off it reminded me of a sensation I remembered picking up through millions of tiny spider hairs, though. A forcefield in a hologram.

Erek was standing out the window, invisible, seeing everything and not able to do a thing to help us.

I dove back into the fray, skittering along the ground. The whole fight had taken maybe five seconds so far, and even I could tell we'd lost. A disembodied andalite arm slammed onto the floor next to me. Something bounced. A tiny, marble-like crystal.

I snatched it up and fought for altitude.

Somebody stood on me. Whether it was one of ours or theirs, I didn't know, but suddenly, my legs didn't work right. That was okay. I didn't need to be able to land.

Struggling to steer without being able to move the lower half of my body, I laboured toward the window and hoped, prayed, that the crystal was still intact. I aimed my little body right at it and flew as fast as I could. If I hit the glass, I'd probably never wake up.

Glass shattered inches in front of my face. A particularly large fragment snapped my wing as something grabbed me out of the air. There was blood. Impact.


	15. Chapter 15

I woke up in a pair of human arms, surrounded by human voices.

“Cassie!” Jake called desperately. “Cassie, you have to demorph!”

I moved. Rachel immediately put me down. I focused on human Cassie.

A few minutes later, I was fully human, sitting on the ground. It was dark. I could hear someone sobbing. “Where are we?” I asked.

“Little bunch of trees, just down from Matcom. Or what's left of Matcom.”

“How did we get here? How... how did we get out of that place?”

Marco swallowed. He looked pale. “Erek. We were toast, man. And then Erek showed up out of nowhere, and he... he took care of those hork-bajir.”

I raised an eyebrow. “He 'took care of' two dozen hork-bajir?”

Marco nodded. He looked sick. So, come to think of it, did everyone else. “All the hork-bajir. All the human-Controllers.”

“It lasted about ten seconds,” Rachel whispered. She was trembling, and on the verge of tears. That scared me more than anything.

Jake indicated a spot over to the left with one arm. Erek was sitting there in the dirt, back to us, head low. Sobbing.

“I'm going to go talk to him,” I said, getting up.

“Good idea.”

Erek didn't look up at my approach. I sat next to him. “Hey.”

“I'm glad you're okay.”

“Thanks to you, so I hear. Are... are you okay?”

He looked at me with holographic human eyes. Maybe he had to choose to make them cry. Maybe he had to choose to give them that empty, hollow look. I don't know what the connection is between the android chee and his projected human body. But his expression answered my question.

No. Erek was not okay.

“You saved us,” I whispered.

“Why did you come?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” I frowned.

“Tonight. You didn't want to be involved in this. And yet you still came.”

“We were on a clock. And we had to get the crystal away from the yeerks.”

Erek shook his head. “You've been talking to Maria. You could've demanded to see her instead. Or you could've refused to give the crystal to me. You know that we, too, are invested in the fate of this planet. You know that I still would have helped. But you didn't.”

“Yeah.” I thought about my answer for a few moments before speaking again. “It's because we've been asking the wrong question.”

“What do you mean?”

“I realised it yesterday. This whole time, we've been asking ourselves, is it okay to make another species violent? Is it okay to change who you are to help us? You had a side, Maria had a side. And we Animorphs...”

“Animorphs?”

“Us. Portmanteau of animal morphers. Not important. We started taking sides, debating the pros and cons, the costs and benefits. But that was never the question. This wasn't about us making the chee violent. Or even about you making the chee violent.

“It's about freedom. All giving you that crystal did was give you the choice. Even chee like Maria can be pacifists if they want. The capability for violence doesn't create an obligation for it. And freedom... freedom is what we fight for. But... but I shouldn't have given you the crystal mid-battle like that. I forced your hand, I made you step in to save us. I'm sorry, Erek.”

“You had no choice. You all would have died.”

“I know. But it still wasn't fair. It's the exact choice I'd been arguing against the others making, and when push came to shove, I didn't even hesitate.”

“You didn't create this situation. I did.”

“No. The yeerks did.”

Erek nodded. “How do you... how do you deal with it? The memories.”

“You try to forget, I guess. Over time, they fade. It gets better. We learn to handle it.”

Erek smiled. It wasn't a happy smile. He tapped his forehead with one finger. “Android. I can't forget. I can never forget... anything.”

I looked at him. Already in my own human mind, the memories of that night's horror were fading. The stomping feet and the pain and the crunch of my wing being broken by flying glass... they were being covered over by mental scar tissue.

What if I could never forget?

What if all those memories were fresh forever?

I realized then why the pemalites had forbidden their creatures to kill. The chee lived forever. Forever was a long time to remember what Erek had done.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Erek nodded. "Yes." He took a deep, ragged breath. “What you said about choices,” he explained, “I made the wrong one. We've... we've been on Earth a long time. I like your species. You have vitality, and passion. It is a different sort of passion to ours, but it is passion all the same. I thought... I thought we could handle it. We've become very good at imitating humans. But we're not like you. We're different. And that's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just...”

“A thing,” I finished.

“Yeah.” He held out his clenched fist, palm down. I knew what he was doing. I didn't want it. But I held out my own hand, and took the pemalite crystal from him.

"I've changed my programming back," Erek said. "We ... I ... maybe at times I can tell you things. Information. But I'll never fight again. I can't join this war. I'm sorry."

I stared at the little crystal in my hand. “Don't you want to talk this over with – ”

“I have.” He stood up to leave.

“Wait,” I said. “Do you have a pen?”

He produced one seemingly from nowhere. I took my emergency blank piece of paper out of my glove and wrote down the name of Rachel's father. His address. A few code phrases that we'd established. “This is a contact that the others don't know about,” I said quietly. “I got him to set up a system in case we needed to get ex-Controllers out of town quickly. He thinks we're andalites, like the yeerks do. You guys are vulnerable, you can't protect yourselves if the yeerks find you. If, in your infiltration of the Sharing, you need to get someone or something out of here and you can't afford yeerk scrutiny...”

“Thank you,” he said. He took the pen and paper, and then wrote a message of his own. “A secure phone number,” he explained, handing it to me. “The yeerks can't trace it. So long as they don't physically bug your telephone, it's safe. If you need help...”

“Thanks.” I put the number in my glove, then looked once more at the crystal in my hand. “Erek. Like you said, you've been here a long time. You know humans. Our history. Our behaviour. Are you sure you want to hand something like this to us?”

“Humanity has done some shocking things,” Erek agreed. “But humans, most of them, are good people. I didn't give the crystal to humanity. I gave it to a human.” He smiled, and the gesture looked genuine. “To an Animorph.”

And without another word, he turned and walked away.


	16. Chapter 16

By unspoken agreement, nobody called anybody else the next day. We needed time to recuperate. Time for the memories to fade.

I decided to go out somewhere after school. It wasn't something I did much. Unfortunately, since becoming an Animorph, the list of fun places to go without war memories attached was pretty small. The mall was a common place for us to meet, and I'd never liked it much anyways. I liked The Gardens, but it was hard to walk past the animal cages without remembering being those animals, my friends being those animals, or how we could use those animals. The forest had been the site of too many dangerous fights. And the beach had had its own share of fights.

In the end, I went with the beach.

It didn't occur to me that other people might have similar thoughts until I was bowled over by Homer, with a Frisbee in his mouth.

“Good work, boy!” Jake called, running over. “Wait, Cassie? Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, getting up. “Your dog just wanted to play.”

Homer had stopped, tail wagging, in front of Jake. Jake pulled at the Frisbee in his teeth. Homer pulled back.

"They just don't get the point of this whole game," I said. "You throw, they catch, they bring it back for you to throw again. Why is that so hard to figure out?"

Jake scratched right behind Homer's ear, and Homer dropped the Frisbee. "Oh, they know how to play the game, all right," Jake said with a laugh. "For them, the game is 'I throw, they catch, they bring it back, they get a good head scratch, then they give up the Frisbee.'"

But just then, Homer lost all interest in the Frisbee. Two dogs were trotting by, tails in the air. Homer jogged over to greet them. They sniffed each other by way of introduction, then took off, running like the giddy, happy, always-excited, dog goofs they were.

It made me smile to watch them.

"It must have been a nice place," I said.

Jake knew exactly what I was talking about. "Yeah. A planet where the people were as sweet and decent as dogs. Yeah, that would have been okay." He sighed. “They would've made such good allies, though.”

“They will make good allies,” I said. "I think the chee are going to go on fighting the yeerks. They'll just be doing it in their own way."

I reached into my pocket and drew out the small crystal. "I still have this, by the way. I don't know what to do about it. This is the most powerful computer ever created. It could rewrite the chee's programming. It could take over every computer on Earth. The pemalite crystal. We almost died getting it. What am I supposed to do with it?"

Jake and I stood there, looking down at more power than any human had ever held in their hand.

Suddenly, I realized we weren't alone.

Homer and the other two dogs were standing right in front of us, watching us. I know this sounds crazy, but I swear some flicker of intelligence appeared in those laughing dog eyes.

The three of them looked at us, and we looked back.

I held out my hand, palm up, to show the dogs the crystal. Homer scarfed the crystal out of my hand as if it were a dog biscuit. But he didn't swallow it. He just held it in his teeth, where it glittered like a diamond.

The three dogs turned and ran down the beach. They ran into the surf and splashed out into the water, paddling for a dozen feet or so.

Then they came back to shore, and had a glorious time shaking themselves violently and spraying water all over two old ladies who were hunting shells.

Maybe someday the pemalite crystal will wash back up on some beach somewhere. Maybe by the time it does, we'll be as wise as the race that created it.

"Homer!" Jake yelled. He threw the Frisbee.

And all three of the dogs, happy, silly, loving fools that they were, went racing after it.


End file.
